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Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
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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."
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Yes!

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

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation