Three unconferences coming up: Transportation Camps in New York and San Francisco, Greenest City Camp in Vancouver, and in April, Planning Technology Conference in Boston.
I looked at the stack of PDFs for readings for my Transportation Analysis class and my schedule travelling between 3 campuses 5 days a week, and cringed, hard. I already hate the idea of printing mountains of readings off, and also don’t read well off backlit screens. So I bought a Kindle, and, as I detail in the rest of this post, I’ve found reading off it, and working to get stuff on it, to be an absolute joy.
I’m a few weeks into my class on Visually Enabled Reasoning, and it’s a deeply interesting class so far. We are starting with some lectures and readings on human cognition, reasoning, decision-making and mental modelling. Taken with the topics we covered in my Decision Insights for Public Policy, I’m really inspired by the idea that [...]
It’s the end of the third week of the semester. I can safely say that my course schedule has shaped up to be an intensive and challenging one: PLAN 548: Transportation Planning Analysis with Jinhua Zhao (class cross-listed with Civil Engineering) PLAN 596: Seminar on Ecological Economics with Bill Rees PLAN 550E: Building North America’s [...]
We’re at the first day of 2011. I’m coming down the homestretch of this journey I started a year and a half ago with this master’s degree. I’ve been here before, and I will be here again. Here are some lessons from 2010 that I’m hoping to carry with me for the relationship between my personal journey and my work.
This post is a messy summary of where my thinking is at for using StratML for official community plans. Firstly, the StratML standard is largely still being defined (their progress can be messily tracked at XML.gov). Part 1 of the standard is available as a schema and covers 7 core elements of strategic plans, and [...]
I’m writing this blog post from Vancouver Open Data Hackathon. These are some takeaways from a conversation with Sue Bigelow from the Vancouver Archives. Sue has been interested in the potential applications of Map Rectifier on scans of maps of Vancouver created by the City of Vancouver over the years as part of their work. [...]
This coming Saturday is International Open Data Hackathon day. In Vancouver, it’s happening at W2 Storyeum in Gastown (details via the ODHD wiki). There was a (very!) short session led by Aaron Gladders at BarCamp Vancouver on what we might focus our efforts on during the Open Data Hackathon, and we settled working on a [...]
On November 10, 2010, at the Open Gov West BC conference, I experienced the exhilaration and terror and joy that is an Ignite presentation, when I shared the concepts, examples and ideas from urban planning that have changed my thoughts on what’s possible with Open Data.
I received the happy news that I will be doing a lightning talk about Open Government BC on November 10th. I’m happy to put what I’ve been learning and thinking about open government in front of people whose work, activities and perspectives I am deeply indebted to, and I hope I’m able to meet some [...]
