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Excellent article by John Geraci on how/why "the long tail" analogy has to come alive in cities, and what it would mean.
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Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. (...)
...imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they've always provided - that's not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM's Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities - they're used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.
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It's interesting to think about the differences between Canada and the US here. In the US, all government data is owned by the people - governments can't keep it back. But in Canada, all government data is owned by the Crown. That means, Canadians have to first get someone in authority to grant them access to it and they have to get permission to use it. #fail #deadendfeudalism

radar.oreilly.com/...w-long-is-your-citys-tail.html - Preview

john_geraci cities data open_source democracy long_tail o'reilly

Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Radar) ponders Adrian Holovaty's announcement that Everyblock will be opensource/ available. Some interesting comment responses.

radar.oreilly.com/...blocks-dilemna-how-do-you.html - Preview

everyblock local_news business_model open_source adrian_holovaty

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

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

Must-see/ must-listen presentation at the City of Toronto 2.0 Web Summit, by Mark Surman on getting cities to think like the web: open, transparent, shared data, mashable, hackable, improve-able.
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three simple challenges to City Hall. They went something like this:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.
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commonspace.wordpress.com/...city-thinks-like-the-web - Preview

mark_surman web_2.0 commonspace cities open_source mozilla urbanism toronto

Great essay by Doc, asking if Linux, open source, the web -- all these things -- are infrastructure. "What is 'infrastructure' anyway?"

www.linuxjournal.com/...understanding-infrastructure - Preview

infrastructure commentary doc_searls linux open_source