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01 Feb 09

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

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!

blog.wired.com/...mark-gorton-ceo.html - Preview

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.
  - Yes! - on 2009-02-01
  Add Sticky Note
- 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.

29 Jan 09

"Wiki Your Town Council - New effort seeks a database on all U.S. elected officials," by David Talbot (MIT Technology Review)

Article about American Solutions, "a national grassroots group based in Washington, DC, that was founded by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich but describes its Internet effort as nonpartisan, is preparing to launch a site that will, at first, allow people to enter basic contact information on all local officials. Then future users can enter their full nine-digit zip code to find the local officials who represent them."

www.technologyreview.com/...22025 - Preview

wiki local_government open_source politics mit_techreview american_solutions

Over the following several months, American Solutions plans to build ways for users to rate the officials on job performance, create social-networking functions around local issues, and let users make free Internet-based phone calls to the officials.
Existing online platforms share data about the more powerful elected officials, such as federal and state lawmakers. Congresspedia allows wiki-style editing of pages about members of Congress, while OpenCongress allows several ways for users to interact, including writing blog posts about specific bills.

And for detailed information about lobbyist activity and campaign contributions, there are sites that track such spending, including one for members of Congress and another covering major state elected officials. Such databases attempt to better organize information that is already available for public scrutiny but is cumbersome to obtain.
3 more annotations...
- Below upper-level elected officials, though, lies a great mass of elected public officials but no central way to find them, share information about them, or approach them online. Search engines only get you so far with, for example, local municipal officials. Assuming you know these people's names, there's still no guarantee that typing them into Google will yield relevant hits. A central site could solve that. Kralik says that the largest such database currently available includes 44,000 elected officials and is accessible through sites such as votesmart.
- "It seems useful to aggregate dispersed information about elected officials and make it easy for citizens to find that information," Weinberger says. "And because it's impossible to predict all the different sorts of information that might be relevant, a wiki is a good choice. A wiki is also a good choice because it distributes the chore of building and maintaining a site with ambitions that stretch from the national to the hyperlocal."
- "In the best case, communities of engaged citizens develop around the site,"

29 Oct 08

DIYcity

John Geraci's new project, DIY city. Well worth checking out: its aim is to figure out how we might use social and mobile apps to remake (or at least help) the city.

As Geraci puts it, "DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them."

Looking forward to seeing more from this.

diycity.org - Preview

diycity john_geraci local_government local_news cities

17 Oct 08

Online technology can help any website use people, not pundits, to drive public debate

Interesting poins by Robert Niles, encouraging use of online technology combined with random sampling techniques to get public opinion front and centre, vs. having pundits either create or estimate the public mood.

www.ojr.org/...1548 - Preview

local_government punditry public_opinion politics politicians robert_niles knight_foundation

28 Jun 08

Rate Your City Councillor : Rating Toronto and Vancouver City Councillors & Alderman

More like this, please:

I so WANT this for Victoria: an online feedback tool to rate your city's councilors. So far available only for Toronto and Vancouver, but, one hopes, soon to expand to other Canadian cities.

PS: of course you can rate your mayor, too.
via Spacing.ca (http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/06/27/rate-your-councillor/)

www.rateyourcouncillor.com - Preview

local_government polls councillors web_2.0 democracy

02 Jan 08

Amalgamation: 10 years later (Toronto Star)

Report by Royson James on 10th anniversary of Toronto's amalgation -- more negative (generally) than Christopher Hume's article (also in today's TorStar), but also full of useful info re. downloading by Province.

www.thestar.com/...290172 - Preview

amalgamation downloading local_government municipal_funding toronto

Against great odds and in the face of trenchant hostility, the amalgamation of seven governments into one unified Toronto has survived its first decade. Barely.
Happy anniversary, megacity.
Never has a forced union been so universally detested and excoriated – every outflow, offspring or offshoot smeared with the "bastard" tag: unwanted, unloved, unappreciated. And yet, alive, if not well.
Some wounds are only now healing, 10 years later. And considering what it's been through, it's a miracle Toronto is still standing.
"It's been a real body blow to the city," says Sewell, still defiant. "I fear for the city's future."
"A disaster," adds MPP Michael Prue, East York's last mayor.
Kathleen Wynne, now education minister, was Sewell's right-hand person back then. Her analysis? "I've knocked on tens of thousands of doors since I got into provincial politics, both in 2002-2003 and 2006-2007, and I have yet to meet anyone who says they think the amalgamation of the city of Toronto was a good idea ... Maybe that's a lie. Maybe I've met two people."
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- Urbanists and planners flocked to the city to study its transit, the co-existence of its multicultural citizens and its two-tier government that thrived even as U.S. jurisdictions clung to tax-defined borders.
  If anything, Toronto's intelligentsia hated the Metro government. It was big, less susceptible to ratepayer influence and had majority political representation from the suburbs of Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke.
  - I don't understand the transition(s) here: urbanists & planners study T.O., but the intelligentsia hated the Metro (amalgamated) idea? - on 2008-01-02
  Add Sticky Note
- But about three-quarters of services were already amalgamated under Metro. Citizens may have felt close to their city councillor, but it was the Metro councillor who was getting them to work on transit, sending out ambulances and police, setting the policies that helped build social cohesion.
  - - this is eerily similar to how Victoria has been shaping up, with the CRD acting as the "Metro" - on 2008-01-02
  Add Sticky Note
- So when Harris, fulfilling his tax-cut, less-government mandate, rode into town with a plan to eliminate a level of municipal government, it was logical to keep Metro and eliminate Scarborough, North York, York, Etobicoke and East York. The biggest fight since "Stop the Spadina Expressway" was on.
  - - bingo. - on 2008-01-02
  Add Sticky Note
- The idea did not infuriate everyone. Opponents hiss that the newspaper editorial boards and many other media were in favour. But others, like ex-mayor David Crombie, also saw value in it.
  Proponents viewed amalgamation as part of a normal evolution that reduced the Toronto area to 13 municipalities by 1953, six by 1967. Others suggested one big Toronto would provide a citywide equity of services otherwise missing.
  
  The province's position was that huge savings would be exacted. But once the entire Harris plan was unveiled – amalgamation plus a huge download of social services and an end to transit funding – opposition was cemented.
- Ten years later, it's virtually impossible to determine which of Toronto's problems are the result of amalgamation, of downloading, or simply inevitable in any case.
  - - key point: downloading? amalgamation? systemic anyway? - on 2008-01-02
  Add Sticky Note
- The city talks of Queen's Park owing it $700 million to $1 billion. On the other hand, it got a $1 billion asset in Toronto Hydro, and the province took on $600 million in education costs.
  What is irrefutable is that the city was set on a path to fiscal failure. Amalgamation was supposed to deliver three main benefits: savings, greater equity and more clout.
  "Savings" were wrung from the system, all right: thousands of jobs cut in the first three years. But that wasn't sustainable. At the same time, more staff were hired for police and transit to cope with growth.
  On equity, the megacity has been a big success, spreading the social safety net across the city. York, the poorest of the old municipalities, has benefited most.
- Toronto has updated a property tax system that was outdated and unfair, and approved a progressive climate change plan that will have influence well beyond our city. The mayor's campaign for a new deal from senior governments has resonated across Canada, lending credence to Toronto's claims of clout.
  - - re. protests against downloading - on 2008-01-02
  Add Sticky Note
- But as an experiment in local democracy, merger has been a huge failure. The megacity's continued survival is a testament mainly to the efforts of a great civic workforce. Its creation was too hurried. Too much was heaped on its head.
  What now? Do we de-amalgamate, as the school board is now pondering? A few diehards have always harboured such thoughts. But the former mayors and Metro chairs, except Prue, say going back is not an option. Better to have the province fix the fiscal mess by taking back social services costs and giving Toronto some breathing room.
  Mayor David Miller has staked his own political survival on the province riding to the rescue.
- Twelve neighbourhood councils might be better than the four community councils we have now. And party politics would more clearly define the platform and expectations of city council.
  - - this part I don't get (since I don't know T.O. well): 12 neighbourhood councils better than four community councils? Really? - on 2008-01-02
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- And Miller doesn't sound like a suicidal hero of the C4LD crowd. In solidifying the mayor's office and investing it with more power, he moves in the opposite direction.
  - - probably wants more of a "strong mayor" model, which in Canada has been non-existent thus far - on 2008-01-02
  Add Sticky Note
- Meanwhile, we can expect a slow evolution. The fight of this generation – a new deal from the province that removes social services costs – is closer than ever.

Megacity politics in shambles 10 years later (Toronto Star)

Commentary (one of several in today's Toronto Star) by Christopher Hume on the 10th anniversary of Toronto's amalgamation. Hume has previously written cogently on the problems municipal infrastructure funding in Canada, and while it doesn't come up in this article, I get the impression that he doesn't want to join in fully with the chorus of complainers who moan about the evils that amalgamation has wrought. The key sentence, I think, is "We have gone to great lengths to empower the local at the cost of the civic," and *that* is something totally applicable to (as of yet) un-amalgamated Victoria.

www.thestar.com/...290200 - Preview

amalgamation christopher_hume local_government politics toronto

Though the forced joining of Toronto and its boroughs left city council and the civic bureaucracy a mess, daily life continues much as it did before former premier Mike Harris unleashed his onslaught.
Then, as now, most of us remained ensconced within our own neighbourhood. Etobicokers still think of themselves as Etobicokers, North Yorkers as North Yorkers, Scarboroughites as Scarboroughites. Until we travel far enough that the finer points of residency are lost, we're reluctant to admit to being Torontonians. Go far enough, however, and even Mississaugans become Torontonians, something they'd be loath to acknowledge in these parts.
The rest of Toronto still jokes about Scarborough, or as we prefer to call it, Scarberia. We still shake our heads at the condo mayhem of "downtown" North York and can't make sense of Etobicoke politics.
Everyone else still despises Toronto – the "old" city of Toronto – for its arrogance and self-absorption. Some things never change.
- - sounds familiar! - on 2008-01-02
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2 more annotations...
- With a few exceptions, no one on council has started to think about Toronto as a whole. The system discourages that at the best of times, never more so than now. The result has been a sharp drop in civic self-confidence; a growing sense Toronto has entered a downward spiral. The blame extends well beyond city hall, but the low level of debate, divisiveness, bitterness and triviality of council meetings has led to feeling that we're no longer able to deal with the problems we face.
  The psychology of amalgamation hasn't created more solidarity between neighbourhoods, but a masochistic, let's-hate-Toronto attitude. But Toronto is us, and we are Toronto. In the decade since amalgamation, we have become our own worst enemy.
- It will take at least a generation to get over our prejudices, for East Yorkers to be able to say, happily, I am a Torontonian. Even then, we will tend to identify with a neighbourhood, rather than the city. In Toronto, people come from the Annex, Cabbagetown, Riverdale, Moore Park, and so on. Only after that, are they Torontonians. We are, don't forget, a city of neighbourhoods. We have gone to great lengths to empower the local at the cost of the civic.