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“Adopt-a-Stop” is our idea for a web and mobile-enabled application for community members to find and share information about the five-block radius around each bus stop. As the name alludes, the service will encourage and empower individual community members to garden and curate and take ownership of an individual Facebook-style page for each stop.

Vancouver Hackathon and Adopt-A-Stop: The Idea

Farewell 2009; Salut 2010

2009 has gone and 2010 has come. Good time to collect my reflections on the high and low points.

2009 the Highs

  • Travel: I travelled a bit. Highlights —
    • Portland in February: connected with dear friends, and saw the city that is the apple of Richard’s eye.
    • Toronto in January: ChangeCamp Toronto.
    • East coast in July: New York, Montreal, Toronto (/Scarborough/Niagara Falls/highway in between). Much emotional closure, joy, and re-discovering the independence and fascination of my first trip in 2005. Reconnected with family — something I will be very glad I did as the self-proclaimed family oral historian-poet.
    • Courtenay (Sept/Dec): two trips. As I often state, very important to immerse myself in how the other other half lives.
  • Career:
    • I was accepted and started the Master’s program at UBC SCARP.
    • Events I attended and enjoyed: Northern Voice 2009, Mental Health Camp*, Open Web Vancouver, ChangeCamp (Toronto and Vancouver), Participation Camp*, BarCamp Vancouver*, Transport Camp*, Interdisciplinary Themes.*
    • …where I presented* or attended sessions on the topics of civic open data, social media in transportation, community GIS and community mapping, and BarCamps in community-building around urban & transportation issues (with a very important sidestep into stigma of mental health issues from a cultural perspective).
    • I helped Social Signal bake up some social media awesome.
    • I then started applying lessons learned as UBCevents‘ communications coordinator, and learning unbelievable amounts about UBC — so many research groups, people, initiatives, general neat stuff going down!
    • Did some media without really intending to. Huzzah. I want to continue to cultivate and articulate my perspective, experiences and opinions in a meaningful way.
  • Health:
    • Biked. A. Lot. And learned to maintain the bike a bit too.
    • Mental Health Camp was a treasure trove: new naming for old, old habits.
    • I’ve settled at eating vegan now about 3 to 4 meals a week. The commitment to reduce my consumption of carnivorous fish is holding, somewhat shakily (wild sockeye salmon caught by friends on Vancouver Island does not count, ha! And this is more an eating-ethics thing than health-related).
  • Projects:
    • Stepped up more fully as the Public Transit coordinator for the Vancouver Public Space Network. SkyTrain party! Burrard Trial!
    • Submitted a proposal for the Knight News Challenge. (A formal countablysilly collaboration too.)
  • Skills:
    • cooking (on the cheap)
    • time/project management
    • communication — the whole shebang.
    • writing (’tis a winding road)

2009 the Lows

  • Still learning the ropes on getting the best work out of myself, consistently.
  • There were a few moments of hard learning and orientation when realizing the nature of where I currently am, where I want to be, and the tools and paths for helping available through the mechanism of the aforementioned Master’s program.
  • Showing I’m grateful! Figuring out what to do with the huge raft of gratitude I have that I’ve yet to express properly for the incredible opportunities I’ve been able to have, the kindness I’ve been shown, the joy and generosity I’ve had the fortune to participate in.
  • Asking for help when I actually need it. Learning how to determine with some rigor when this is true or false!
  • Identifying, accepting, working through and lightening baggage. Oh, Lord.
  • Generally not letting life take the wind completely out of my sails.
  • DEADLINES. Enough said.

So all in all, a good mix of everything, no matter how you cut it. All setting the stage for…

2010 the Horizon

  • Career: the orchestration will be hugely challenging, but with any hope, not entirely impossible.
    • Conferences! (…travel squeezed in with that?)
    • Internships! Gunning heavily on working on something neat for this coming summer. I’ll be posting more about this very soon…
    • Talking to people! I’ve been generally terrified of speaking to planners as I learn to navigate the precise names for what I want to do. I’m going to be thinking really hard about what I can do to make meetings with faculty less uncomfortable, more relevant for me and them, and to do more reaching out with people of similar interests online and at the University.
    • Mentoring! Building up the courage to put into words what I’m having trouble with and how I would like to get help — and what I can offer people in return for their time, effort and energy.
    • Reaching! I want to explore doing a semester overseas, possibly in Britain. Who do I talk to, to make this happen? What can I offer research-muscle wise to make this a win-win for someone else? What do I actually want to get out of this? Answering those questions to the best of my ability will be a mighty feat, but do-able.
  • Projects: continuing to spread those odd, crazy ideas around and learn to shuffle them to life. More work with the VPSN, more time at VHS, more open data hackathons. More making of things that didn’t exist before in general. And maybe some Processing.
  • Health: continuing to bike, maybe some swimming. More dark leafy greens. More unencumbered breathing. More sleep. More mindful yeses and noes, for my sake. Oh, and due to certain holiday blessings, there will definitely be more social and regular consumption of homemade waffles too.
  • People: Getting better at making time for friends. More making awesome with awesome people. More telling them they I enjoy their company. More bowing head in gratitude.

That sounds just about right. Manageable, but still ambitious enough.

Re-imagining Britannia Community Centre and surrounding neighbourhood

Live on The Drive? Hung out there? Ever walk its streets and think, “This place is perfect! NEVER CHANGE!” Or, conversely, “Gawds, this place is awful, won’t someone please do something about it?” (Doubtful, but just covering the bases…)

This range of reactions is exactly what me and my class have been going through, every week since mid-October. Except then we do some readings, crunch some numbers, cut up some museum board, and then do something about it — in the form of modelling design interventions on the built form of the neighbourhood.

Buildings, the width of sidewalks, amenities in the park, amounts of greenspace, community gardens, renewable energy generation, permeable paving, towers, heritage preservation — you name it, we’re dreaming and angsting over it.

My Theory and Methods of Urban Design Studio class here at SCARP is currently loosely collaborating with the Britannia Community Centre Society to think about how the neighbourhood (specifically, between Commercial and Clark, and Venables and 1st Avenue) might grow and change, as well as in trying to tackle some of the neighbourhood’s challenges, present and future, social, economic and environmental. A tall order.

Each design team is tasked with balancing three priorities in their designs:

  1. The stated values and desires as expressed to us by members of the Society’s board;
  2. The principles of good urban design, especially in consideration of Vancouver’s future population growth;
  3. Considerations for ecological design, for buildings that provide benefits and services that offset its impact or have a net positive impact on the surrounding neighbourhood.

As our design interventions are rolled out week to week, a team of my colleagues are also diligently rolling out updates to the Britannia Redesign Visions website, with pictures of our scale model, figure ground diagrams, and vision statements from the design teams.

For the web and design professionals (or just plain old web 1.5 savvy, for that matter) in the crowd, a word of caution: the site is, in fact, flashtastrophic, and looks like a MySpace website. It has no permalinks. And while I’ll argue that makes it unpleasant as long as you’re willing to, I’ll also throw in there that I think the “design” has merit, if you consider the fact that the neighbourhood is home a large number of aboriginal youth, and the site has an inner-city high school. Our aesthetics as designers and planners just might not be in play, and I think the people in my class who worked on the website are trying to argue that the youth in the area now — and their aesthetic values, if not their XHTML-compliant functional ones — should get consideration and steering priority.

We’re inviting any – and all! – to submit comments on our designs. We’ll also be doing a final presentation to the neighbourhood on December 1st at Britannia Community Centre, where every team will present on the goals and rationale behind their interventions. Should be good, interesting fun, and we’d definitely appreciate it.

If you’re curious about what my specific contribution is, check out “Phase 2″ — my team’s design is in the righthand column…

TransportCamp: rapid-fire impressions

  1. Not being at the opening circle is a HUGE set-back when it’s a new crowd.
  2. I clearly need to polish up on my how to have the “what is social media?” conversation; but under the circumstances, especially with such a thoughtful bunch, I think the group facilitated itself quite well.
  3. A couple of weeks ago in class, we had a lecture on Planning Support Systems – the official title for “software used in the urban planning field.” The reason they are called that is because they are tools that assist planners in the tasks involved in planning, which is (and is perceived as) a qualitatively different task from operating a transit agency. It was helpful for me to remember this.
  4. My key points: social media is meant to augment the diversity that you might get from more traditional methods (although even the actual diversity of those means are in question). You also tend to engage people at a level of intensity that is quite different: witness the dialogue and comments directed to the Transit Police Twitter account.
  5. I somehow managed to self-select myself into no sessions about community. That’s slightly disappointing.

Gordon Price closed with a rousing call-to-arms, reminding us of the room beyond the walls of BCIT. Coalition-building is the key to advancing a vision of walkable, vibrant communities built for people and not cars. He also stressed the importance of talking about the “nasties” — if we want to build stuff, the money has to come somehow, and it can’t just be about new taxes for the people we don’t like.

All in all, I should probably brush up on what works for me at non-social media powered conferences. Still a fun time. Thanks to Jeremy, the Car Co-op, and their sponsors for the insightful and meaningful space!

Off to drinks.

Right Livelihood and the Planning Profession

I was lured out of my self-imposed school bubble yesterday by the lure of Fresh Media, an incredible event organized by the Incredibles over at SaveOurNet.ca. The focus of the event was exploring personal expression — written, analog, digital, whatever — for progressive social change. Held at a hidden gem on Hastings Street across from an in-progress under-construction W2 Woodwards site, it was uncanny, diverse, and not at all what I expected. I was almost overwhelmed with the excitement of seeing old friends and were-they?-friends I hadn’t seen in small lifetimes, getting to introduce amazing, innovative people to teach other, and trying not to get swept up and away.

It couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. I find that I’m often most excited about my planning program when I am talking to people who are not in it: when I see how eager they are to share their thoughts, experiences and conversations with me about how the complex decisions they find themselves making; the tradeoffs they are forced to weigh; the sneaky things they are proud to cope with. Conversely, I find my excitement wanes when I am in the thick of the actual work: I struggle to stay awake skimming environmental assessment reports; I chafe at the seeming futility of the negotiation process at times; and don’t even get me started on how little I actually know about the practice of crafting builds for human habitation.

I figure, this comes with the bargain: no glory without the guts to apply and engage with the full machinery of making stuff work. This is the difference between just being an armchair planner and a real one: a stomach for the demands of baking rigor into the system. I give my ADHD trait too much free reign to actually be designing buildings.

Beth reminded me of a phrase I haven’t heard in a while: right livelihood. I’m not a technological determinist but I’ll admit allowing myself the occasional moment of getting carried away with the pretty-shiny. I see the work of many of the faculty here at the SCARP program to be, as we might expect from an academic institution, a highly moralistic standpoint. I read into their attitudes, their actions and their interests, a feeling that the state at which we find the world makes the idea of progress (including technological progress) laughable at best and distracting at worst. The high ground on which they stand permits only one right livelihood, and that lies in empowering and enabling others to save themselves as best they can. (These others are mostly everywhere-but-here at UBC, except a person finding themselves in such dire a circumstance comes to the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and freaks me out by asking for change for coffee at our hinterland campus.)

If I let myself breathe, I remember that it’s a difference of degrees. Working in transportation policy is profoundly about trying one’s best for the people who are here, and who can’t help but be anywhere but here, despite how markedly unpleasant it’s becoming. I saw a friend from high school yesterday who made Montreal her home right out of high school. Having numbed myself to the ridiculousness of Vancouver, I’ve forgotten that one can, as she described it, go into a mild panic over the price of cheese.

The question this program wants to answer is, “What is the role of an urban planner if we are post-progress?” even though we very clearly are not and likely won’t be until such a situation is hefted upon us. The question I want to answer (while in this program, but I’ll take it however I can get it), is, “How can the technologies we make meaningful impact and change in society, beyond mere entertainment, consumption, distraction and subjugation?” What I’m seeing right now is that there are strong traditions in planning — sometimes it’s innocent, and sometimes it’s flat-out ignorant — that thinks this work has absolutely nothing to do with communication technology. (I was well-warned in advance that this might drive me insane, so I only have myself to blame on this front.)

I think this manifests sometimes as a battle between designers of experience: urban designers and planners want people to engage with their meticulously and intricately-calculated spaces, made with conviviality, “eyes on the street” and people-watching in mind. Interaction designers and information architects want those same qualities, but in the ether of the online layer, as people rip, mix and burn the markers of their identities, screen to page, pen to pixel. The two get knitted together with trackers, sensors, geolocative goodness, cameras augmenting reality.

It’s always a struggle to surmount the false dichotomy. My ability to do what I love and create value for someone else lies 95% in my ability to demonstrate the value of what I love with the goals others are trying to achieve. There are plenty of others working this space — I’m flattered that some of them are starting to find me, even! — and now it is down to the task of taking what I see, and having it speak to what others need to hear.

Learning the UBC ropes through UBCevents

I’ve hinted here or there at what my latest gig is — on top of being a Master’s student, that is — and I’m now happy to be able to announce it because, after a few delays, my team and I were (finally!) able to launch our blog today.

Since mid-August, I have been working as the Communications Coordinator for a unique project the University of British Columbia called UBCevents. It’s exactly what it sounds like — an events calendar for everything happening at UBC’s three campuses (Point Grey, Robson Square and Okanagan). I sometimes refer to it as “Upcoming.org for UBC.” The fun part is that the tool, being built on an open source product, makes ample use of open standards like RSS and iCal formats. But the best part? I get to apply my ideas and express my enthusiasm for social media in large organizations and get my feet wet on balancing transparency with meeting a mandate and providing a service — an experience I may never get tired of.

More than that, it’s been a great way to learn about the incredible work of fellow students and faculty at UBC — not a day goes by in this job that I don’t learn about a new group on campus with a three-or-more letter acronym doing something really cool that I’d always wanted to know or wondered about. And it almost gets unfortunate, because I tend to be way too busy with school to go to any of them! But knowing what I’m missing out on is certainly better than being in the dark on it all.

As I said, we’ve just launched our UBCevents blog. It’s primarily intended for our content providers and people who are integrating UBCevents into their website, but it’ll give you a snapshot into a project I am extremely proud to be a part of. I work with a fantastic ensemble of team members — who I’m either less technical than or more technical than at times, depending on what it is you’re wondering about — and does some cool stuff within the institutional constraints and aims of the university, which is officially the oldest entity I’ve ever worked for. I’ve interacted with people from groups as diverse as Student Development, Public Affairs and UBC IT, and it’s been a blast.

Now that the blog’s launched, what’s next? I’m hoping to eke out a workable strategy for UBCevents on Twitter (you can take a peek at what’s gone on so far). It’s been fun to participate in conversations about UBC where I can, but as I’ve sometimes bemoaned, I actually do like to pay attention in class and am also very happy with my non-smart aka. dumb phone, so an effective and consistent mechanism for re-tweeting and conversing still remains elusive.

Next time you find yourself at a UBC campus with some time to spare, look up the UBCevents calendar to see what’s up!

Social Media and Planning, or My Passion and Frustration Story in Progress

During BarCamp, I attended Boris Mann and Mark Busse’s session on Balancing Passion and Frustration – but I stepped out to chat with someone across the room in the middle of the session, and now I’m kicking myself a bit for it. Near the start, I offered the story of how I turned one of my frustrations into passion, but I didn’t quite have the wherewithal at the time to realize I’m actually still quite frustrated. It’s still fueling my passion, but there are still ways in which it is manifesting in actions and reactions that are not constructive or helpful, and this post deals with that. (For the five people I’ve had 80% of this conversation with already — skip to the end, it’s new.)

The example I gave was the frustration around transit that I subsequently channeled into helping organize and dive into thinking about TransitCamp. The frustration I feel right now is about TransportCamp, the rapidly-approaching event which I wrote about a few weeks ago. On the one hand, I will admit to great deal of pure pettiness around my feelings towards it, because the organizers vary greatly in vision and background from Vancouver TransitCamp. Their use of the words “BarCamp-inspired” is deliberate: I don’t see the BarCamp principles baked into the way that TransportCamp has been organized. There are almost no social media “hooks” into the event, no sense of openness.

My conclusion as to why this event was different and why it grated me so boils down to this: we have differing narratives of how change on transportation and transit issues will happen. Will it be the result of many people who spend their days working in transportation and transit-related organizations as part of their professional lives coming together to speak to each other at an unconference, as they are often paid to do, networking and speaking to each other, sharing and reinforcing their passion?

Or does it come from the periphery: from getting these sorts of people together:

  • people who use transit but whose life passion lies in something else
  • people who gauge the depth and breadth of the issues with different yardsticks
  • people who don’t, never have and never will work in the planning or transportation-related industries

…and getting them to explore what their experiences of the city have been like?

In other words — to be the first organized opportunity to speak about transit and transportation, for as many people as possible, by changing the nature of proposition. I’d like to think that that was what me and the other organizers of TransitCamps — in Toronto, in Vancouver, in the Bay Area, in Edmonton — have all been aiming for, and did. Not to say that TransitCamps weren’t attended by professionals – they certainly were! Just not professionals that had anything to do with transit issues. I’ll also go out on a limb and say that the TransitCamps are profoundly interdisciplinary and user-centric by virtue of how they are organized.

My eureka moment came this morning, and as these things often go, I wonder why I didn’t think of it before. Neither one of these approaches is right, and yet both are right.

Each event plays to the strength of its organizers: formal institutional players on TransportCamp’s side, informal conversation participants connected by social networks on the TransitCamp side (probably more so in Vancouver than in other places, where the organizers generally had much better luck getting the orgs out – and why yes, I will take that critique personally too).

But it goes a little deeper than that. I recognize that this difference of methods is probably going to be my biggest hurdle to overcome during my Master’s program in planning as well. Institutions are organized around certain logics: of funding, of hierarchy, of science. While I’m learning about these systems (quite thoroughly and deeply in some places, gaining operational literacy in others), they do not speak to the emotion, or in some cases, passion, which I think, more often than not, fuels the decisions in this area. As experience and some books on interpersonal relationships might tell you, you can’t apply rationality to a person who needs emotional acknowledgment. (This is where I start to feel really badly about having deferred my class on planning history and theory, where I will be learning about, among many others, ideas like Therapeutic Planning.)

So, to summarize, I have successfully identified, if not quite surmounted, my reticence around difference in methods. Phewf. I needed that. So I will try (if I’m not swamped by work) to be representin’ at TransportCamp. I’m torn between doing a session on why TransitCamps/ChangeCamps are interesting and important both in and outside of Vancouver (since this is clearly not a ‘Camp going crowd), and giving my Twitter in Transit presentation one more go before the final curtain — any preferences or thoughts?

Today, tomorrow, I am grateful

I have a huge chip on my shoulder about thanking people. It’s been a long and arduous journey (mostly having to do with my family) that I recall every battle scar for. I’m coming to the realization that this is a big problem, for which I currently lack the resources to get proper therapy for, so I’m just going to have to do this here, on my blog, until I get a little better at doing it elsewhere.

I’m grateful for the chances I get to connect with people. Whether through work, school, or whatever strange situations life puts me in, it makes me who I am, and I’m glad I get to be me, and I can only hope I give as much value to others in conversation as I know they give to me.

I’m grateful for the chance to do work to advance the things I believe in. I believe in listening. I believe in making things better together. I believe in living without diminishing the ability of those around me, or who come after me, to live themselves. I’m grateful to everybody who has supported me in order to give me this chance: my parents, my friends, their friends, the many generous people who have materialized this support in some way: a letter; a vote of confidence; a hug or some well-placed words during a hard time.

I’m grateful I’m able to get the things I find it hard to ask for, like really, really good feedback. I’m striving to learn how best to receive this, as well as to ask for it. My ability to improve is severely limited without help on triangulating the truth. Thanks to those who’ve got my back.

I’m grateful for the wisdom conveyed through life in so many strange and funny ways, and I’m grateful for the people, the ideas and the spirit that open my heart and mind to receive (or, as the case more often is, to observe) this wisdom.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Twitter in Transit, take 1, at BarCamp Vancouver 2009



barcamp YVR

Originally uploaded by rocketcandy


Last Saturday, the grid at BarCamp Vancouver was too compelling and I pitched a seat-of-my-pants talk to share some upcoming research I’ve been working on, looking at the use of Twitter by transit agencies (focusing on TransLink here in Vancouver, the Toronto Transit Commission in Toronto, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco). The trick is that it’s almost entirely quantitative, so it’s serving as a nice bridge between my planning and communication work, and stretching me quite a bit in my quantitative analysis capabilities.

I’ll be presenting this research in a more fully-formed and rigorous way at an academic conference in November 6-7 happening in Vancouver called Interdisciplinary Themes — The City: Culture, Society, Technology.

I’m going to save my exhaustive, comprehensive blog post on the topic for after that presentation, when the kinks have worked themselves out more fully; in the mean time, Miss604 Rebecca Bollwitt captured some quotes from me and others at the session in her BarCamp Vancouver 2009 liveblog. Thanks to Bryce, Liz and Stephen Rees for their pictures of my session; this conference is also the first time I’ve taken notes on a projected tablet during question period, and here is the final image of my notes.

My observation thus far, wading into the transportation research literature, is that social media seems inherently to a challenge for it as an industry, because quantitative methods are baked into its decision-making and knowledge-making structures to the core. And this extends to the marketing of transit. And while social media is, on the one hand, about normal distributions about as much as everything else, there’s been a constantly niggling feeling to me that everything I’m learning about sampling is also profoundly off mark in some important ways when it comes to social media and personal expression.

But for now, back to work.

Open311 – opening the city like we really mean it

Last Friday, due to a great stroke of fortune, I got to visit the Vancouver 311 call centre and hear a presentation from two of that project’s key figures: the person who championed the project within City Hall, Barbara Pearce, and the Operations Manager, Darcy Wilson. I didn’t know too much about the 311 project beyond the barest of details, so it was very exciting to learn from them, the process they underwent to plan and implement 311, as well as their results to date, since the centre went live in February of this year. I asked a gazillion questions, and they were patient in answering them, and I wasn’t able to stump them on much of anything.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across this from my Planning Innovation Heroes down at The Open Planning Project: naturally, it’s called Open311.

Open311 Dev Camp in New York, Oct. 24 2009

[The Open311 website] is meant to facilitate an international effort to build open interoperable systems that allow citizens to more directly interact with their cities. Many 311 systems provide a broad range of information and services, but currently the primary focus here is coordinating a standardized, open-access, read/write model for citizens to report non-emergency issues.

…and, what is a movement without a time and place to dig our heels in and make it so? Open311 DevCamp (register here) is happening on October 24th in New York City — but accessible to 311 teams across the world through the magic of the Internet. The event is free to attend, physically or virtually.

This is a DevCamp style un-conference to coordinate a standard specification for 311 services. Washington D.C’s 311 API will be a major case-study for developing a more universal 311 API. In general, this DevCamp will be an opportunity to discuss and develop what’s needed to make 311 services more accessible and for cities to share knowledge for mutual benefit. The event is intended for developers, project managers, and policy makers involved with 311 services. We encourage those involved with 311 services from all cities to take part.

Having advocated and obsessed over open civic data the way I have for the past 6 months, open311 is nothing short of astounding. A couple weeks ago, after my previous post regarding how open civic data can and (IMHO) should change the way the City thinks about putting resources online, a conversation with a friend got me thinking about how open data has been interpreted (this was prior to the city’s data catalogue going public-beta). One interpretation is that the City is simply making accessible information that is already available to members of the public willing to hit up a desk at City Hall — and indeed, much of the information that we think shouldn’t be publicly available might only seem private due to security by obscurity.

But I’ve always thought of it as something much more: that cities might even start proactively disclosing things they never had thought of doing before. Open311 strikes me as just that: the walking of the talk, beyond the baby steps of giving access to what’s most obvious.

Are 311-using cities in Canada (Vancouver, as well as Calgary and most recently, Toronto) able and willing to realize this next step of open data? I’m the last person able to provide an educated opinion on that, but I’ve certainly got my fingers crossed.