With that in mind, if you are on Twitter, I invite you to post one or many tweets on the question:

How does Twitter help you as a planner?
What do you think planners or planning should know about Twitter?

Let’s get a conversation going using the hashtag #plannerstweet!

Why are you interested?

My research for my master’s thesis is examining how organizations have used and understand Twitter for public engagement on sustainability issues, so I’m interested in how planners see Twitter and how they carry these perceptions into their work! I have some more information on my research available in this blog post about my research.

More personally, I have been using Twitter since before I became a student of planning, and arguably it has been a pretty important part of how I learn about planning best practice and the many perspectives people bring to questions about the future of cities, and I think it is changing the way people form and understand community in ways that are relevant to planning.

How will you be using what you hear?

I’ve gotten a lot of advice from people I’ve talked to about my research to use Twitter itself to engage people in conversation about my research, and figured now, while I’m fairly early in the research process, is as good a time as any to let people know what questions I’m asking and how I’m thinking of answering them.

On February 2, I will be giving a presentation at the Canadian Association of Planning Students conference on February 2, 2012, entitled “Twitter for community and engagement.” I’ll be presenting some initial key ideas about how I’ll be conducting this research to fellow students (each with their own interests, opinions and experiences with both planning, social media and technology generally), and I will also do a summary of what’s been said about planners tweeting. I’ll make that presentation file available once the conference has ended as well.

This is pretty new for me and I’m looking forward to learning whatever I can from it. With any hope, the people I’ve been talking to and following who talk about planning, feel like weighing in on this!

This also seems like a good time to ask — the Transportation Research Board just held their annual meeting just wrapped up in Washington, D.C. (where I learned a lot just by following along on Twitter with the #trbam tag), where many were enthusiastically tweeting and pulling others to join in the digital backchannel.

Finally…, However you use Twitter is relevant. Although my personal interest is public engagement, planners do a lot of things that aren’t public engagement that are potentially impacted by Twitter and social media too. Whether it’s following along conference (like I do, a lot), keeping in touch with those people you connected with but are far away from, or just keeping an ear to the ground on who else is talking about what is going on in places that matter to you, it’s all fair game. Sky’s the limit. (Anyway, this is Twitter, I couldn’t stop you if I tried.)

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on using Twitter!

I’m feeling a renewed interest to doing so. I’m blogging right now from Vancouver ChangeCamp, at the Hive co-working space here. It’s a grey and rainy day here in Vancouver, and the rooms are abuzz with conversations about all sorts of possible changes; and Colleen is across town speaking at TEDxSFU.

I think about the people who I’ve seen spoiling public processes online. I think about the discussions I’ve helped facilitate where people feel the need to assert their opinion in a group situation (either on- or off-line), often at the expense of others’ patience. They are viewed as droning, or being unconstructive or inarticulate, or, in Internet spaces, they are being trolls, and depending on the conversation venue, they are voted down, tuned out, ignored or harassed for what they say.

Does anonymity breed contempt? I find it interesting that lots of contempt gets thrown at City Council during public hearings, where a person’s relative anonymity may vary. I see Colleen’s point, that your credibility as a citizen contributing to a public forum has everything to do with whether you are willing to put your name and face to your opinions — or, as she put it, “people are less likely to act out if they are themselves.” As I identified in my previous post on this topic, however, I feel like that speaks too much from a privileged position — it assumes that “being ourselves” is better than otherwise, and I don’t think that’s a one-to-one equivalence. This was really driven home for me in conversation with April Smith. As a resident of the downtown eastside, she operates in an entirely different systems, where reputation and anonymity have a very specific reference to her physical world, and everything to do with her personal safety, her ability to do and be what she wants.

I think danah boyd‘s recent comments about privacy online to the Wall Street Journal were really insightful about helping us sort this out. Specifically:

[...] privacy is not simply the control of information. Rather, privacy is the ability to assert control over a social situation. This requires that people have agency in their environment and that they are able to understand any given social situation so as to adjust how they present themselves and determine what information they share. Privacy violations occur when people have their agency undermined or lack relevant information in a social setting that’s needed to act or adjust accordingly.

In sum, I don’t think it should be taken lightly that sharing one’s location as a requirement for entry might pose a barrier. At very least, it’s a process that involves trust, and I don’t see much exploration into how to earn that trust, only that having faith that the trust won’t be betrayed is a price of admission into the discussion space.

Image borrowed from the Buzzer Blog. When was the last time you rode a Vancouver bus this empty in the daytime?

Last week, TransLink announced that they are running a contest/campaign on their Facebook page involving riders’ pet peeves in transit. They are encouraging people to people to vote, elimination-style, on the behaviors observed on transit that people find most irritating. The incentives to do so, aside from that wonderful feeling of having gotten your feelings off your chest, are a boat of prizes ranging from branded swag to a new iPhone 4S.

With all due respect to the staff at TransLink — many of whom I know to varying degrees, have interacted with a bunch, think highly of and sympathize with in the nature of their work — this contest leaves a very, very bad taste in my mouth as a person committed to nurturing community and a culture of support for public transportation. It reflects an unsophisticated and unenlightened approach to the question of how to encourage civility, and my hope is this post will shed some light on how it could have been done differently, as many others have also noted in comments on TransLink’s blog.

To be fair, TransLink’s contest does a couple of things.

• It reminds us of “the rules,” pointing out what it means to be good neighbours, good citizens, good travel companions, in respecting the space and experience of others. Nothing wrong with that.
• It encourages us to attempt to find some humour in these situations, through the use of cartons satirizing the behaviours they are trying to draw attention to, like listening to one’s music too loud, putting bags on seats, or — heaven forbid — offending someone’s olfactory sense. Ok, nothing terribly wrong with that either.

But as someone concerned with engagement for sustainable urban transportation, who makes a point of tracking the impressions and emotional narratives around transit, I want to draw attention to what else this contest is doing in the course of achieving these objectives.

This campaign encourages us to give voice to our sense of indignance around the experiences we have about transit that are specifically caused by other riders. This essentially encourages us to accept the belief that it is the presence of other people that makes public transit undignified.

I find this highly problematic on two levels. First, it deals a blow in the attempt to frame transit as an equally good, if not better, transportation option compared to the car, with its climate control, pricy isolation and image of rugged independence. Secondly, it is giving institutional support to the use of humour as a corrective for frustration in the social experience of transit. Instead of seeking to encourage compassion for those we share transit spaces with who may have genuine and legitimate reasons for acting the way that they do, dialogue, or civil discourse, this contest feeds our sense of self-righteousness.

Are the sentiments nurtured by this contest going to encourage people who find these behaviours problematic (which may range from everybody to nobody depending on the actual circumstances) to politely engage people in understanding the external impact of what they do? Maybe. A much more likely scenario, is that it will provoke altercations and conflicts between those feel they are in the ‘right’ (they have the rules on their side), and those who may be somewhere on the spectrum between being deliberate jerks, and experiencing what constitutes their life on transit. Mothers feed their children on transit. People who take transit may be time-poor, working multiple part-time jobs having to multi-task not out of choice but necessity. Binners bring their bags of cans and bottles on transit. And as unsavory as it is to think about (and one commenter’s story shows), public transit may at times even be a public health vector. (Just ask Hong Kong.) And yes, people with a wide range of challenges and differing abilities also take transit.

Some blogs have the concept of TransLink’s contest baked right into their DNA. Commuter Contempt (albeit it is based in the US) already illustrates that some of us might only half a beat away from full-on Transit Rage. While the contest’s humourous illustrations and prizes may keep things light-hearted, what’s to stop people who don’t like people on transit to re-direct their rage towards transit itself? Or other people whose use causes perceived “inconvenience” to other transit riders, like the elderly? This contest encourages riders to identify as “victims” of others’ non-conformity and appears to give “justice” to the victims, rather than encouraging people to use situations of conflict as a teaching opportunity for dialogue on the challenges of sharing space.

I think humour definitely, certainly has a place. Humor is fantastic and necessary and human and builds incredible bridges — when it is used correctly. Not to ostracize, scapegoat, or to make us feel good about ourselves at the expense of some categorically defined other. Chances are those others are actual, real people — and they may take some offense to being treated as the butts of an agency-sanctioned joke if someone they are sharing space with is self-righteously attempting to assert power over them.

From the Buzzer Blog. Does that mother look like she modelling respectful, assertive communication to you? Maybe that lizard just got off a double shift and has already missed their stop.

I can definitely see how this emerged from TransLink’s best intentions. “Maximize participation with incentives! Repackage it into a lighter hearted, humourous affair! Get some gallows humour out of joking about a race to the bottom of transit unpleasantness, and get it on people’s radar in an unconventional way. Asking people politely like every other government entity does is boring and going to get us ignored — so let’s doing something more offbeat!”

I’ll even allow that my particular disposition, occasional moments of policy wonkiness, and specific interest in transit puts me squarely outside the target audience for this campaign. As I’ve tried to illustrate above, I’m by no means disagreeing with the general thrust of TransLink’s intentions — after all, as a transit rider, I would personally benefit from having people taking better care of transit facilities and being more considerate of others in the space.

But is this contest the way to encourage riders to be communicative, assertive, compassionate and mindful in negotiating conflicts in space while using transit — or the larger project of building a base of citizens with whom to advocate for the resources necessary to have better services and world-class transit? In my view, absolutely not.

(And for the record, my biggest pet peeve is people who use nail clippers on the bus.)

See also:

• Buzzer Blog editor Robert Willis addresses some of the critiques posed by Todd Sieling. While I’m at it, I’d also like to echo Todd’s thanks to Rob and others who continue to be responsive and show they are listening online.
• Paper by Tod Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute on Transportation and Social Exclusion.
• Fundamental attribution error — a problem we make not just in choosing to take transit, but approaching the behaviour of others generally.

danah boyd writes on the recent Internet debate around Google banning the use of psuedonyms on its new social networking service, Google+. She writes,

Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly.

I’m interested in the implications this has in the planning engagement process. While a tool like PlaceSpeak is rooted in the idea that sharing where you live with authorities lends credence to your input, participation, and sense of belonging-ness, I’d be curious to know what precedent there is for planning participants to not want to be identified. Perhaps in situations where there is a lot of community pressure to maintain solidarity by supporting or rejecting something as a group.

It also begs the question of how and whether online political participation can or should be linked up with the rest of our online lives, and what differentiates the situations in which that linkage is desirable versus undesirable. A few salient statements on this can be found on skud’s post describing who is hurt by a ban on psuedonyms:

“I enjoy being part of a global and open conversation, but I don’t wish for my opinions to offend conservative and religious people I know or am related to. Also I don’t want my husband’s Govt career impacted by his opinionated wife, or for his staff to feel in any way uncomfortable because of my views.”

“I’ve been stalked. I’m a rape survivor. I am a government employee that is prohibited from using my IRL.”

I’m continually fascinated by how we will learn to accord and reconcile our online and offline selves, and how individuals will refigure and subvert the power that institutions exercise on our reputation. It’s pretty much doing away with identity as an obscurity exercise. Meanwhile, participating in planning processes come with their own issues around power — especially in places like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where claims to legitimacy and the desire to help the needy war with vested interests, bureaucratic particularities and many, many people in various states of distress.

As danah has always pointed out, who you are is only inconsequential if it is something you can benefit from, rather than being victimized, or explicitly threatened with loss of autonomy, control or freedom, because of who you are. As this migrates into the real world of people who can start making life hard for me, I wonder at scenarios based off stories I’ve heard from others. For instance, if I decided I pursue some form of activism in my neighbourhood, and it ran counter to the interests of my landlord, would s/he look for ways to evict me, and would their task be made easier because my real name is all over the place?

I’m a big believer that we can adjust our culture to compensate for the potential abuses made possible by these tools. As David Eaves has written in the past,

It will be interesting to witness a world where grandparents have to explain to their grandchildren why they were climate change deniers on their Facebook page. Or why you did, or didn’t join a given political campaign, or protest against a certain cause.

Ultimately, I think all this remembering leads to a more forgiving society, at least in personal and familial relationships, but the world of pundits and bloggers and politicians may become tougher. Those who found themselves very much on the wrong side of history, may have a hard time living it down. The next version of the daily show may await us all. But not saying anything may not be a safe strategy either. Those who have no history, who never said anything at anytime, may not be seen relevant, or worse, could be seen as having no convictions or beliefs.

There is likely to be a ton of anxiety and an adjustment period full of potential pain before that vision can even come close to being realized, if it ever really can. (This recent story on BoingBoing about mug shot online blackmail relates to this as well.)

In short, I see urban planning, particularly as it pertains to engagement and involvement of members of the public, as one interest among a host of others when it comes to sorting out the intricacies of online identity. Given that decision-makers often get a lot out of knowing things about who’s feeding back to them — basic demographics but also income level, origins, occupations, housing tenure history — in order to understand how to weigh what they say, I imagine we’ll start to see some questions around what degrees of disclosure make your word worth it to the person one is talking to.

Last word to danah:

There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.

Last week, at the Open Gov West BC conference, I experienced the exhilaration and terror and joy that is an Ignite presentation. Never heard of it? An Ignite presentation involves giving a series of presenters (in OGWBC’s case, ten) 5 minutes each exactly with 20 self-advancing slides, which works out to 15 seconds per slide. It was my first time preparing and delivering such a presentation, and I’m delighted, despite a couple dicey, nervous moments during the run-up, that people expressed to me that they enjoyed the points I made.

Figuring out the meat of the presentation was surprisingly difficult. I’m grateful that after a lot of perkolating and with the help of a great friend, I was more able to hear what it was about my message resonated and what could be cut out without affecting what I wanted to say. However, the result is that the title is perhaps somewhat deceiving: it’s not so much about open data as it is about what I see as a possible future for open data — if we work to build it, often through relationship.

I was happy to incorporate what I understand of Judith Innes and David Booher’s framework of collaborative rationality into my talk. I’ve written about it here on my blog before and it picks up on a number of themes I want to incorporate into my own planning practice, such as storytelling, local knowledge, authentic dialogue, and multiple ways of knowing. It adds a rich layer of meaning to the questions around technology: if this is a process worth doing, how does social media or online collaboration enhance the experience of this (and how might it detract from it)?

I got some great feedback on it in person but I’d look forward to hearing any other thoughts others may have on it.

Links related to the content of my presentation

I don’t remember quite what I said in my pitch, so until the video playback is available, this is what I think I said the session would be about:

Governments at the local municipal, provincial and (hopefully) federal level are starting to make data about what they do for us open. Let’s talk about how non-profits might make use of open data as part of their advocacy and convening conversations on what is important to us in improving our neighbourhoods and daily lives.

The session was nice and small, about 8 people at the end. I started by describing the brief history of open data, starting with Apps for Democracy but also mentioning the closer-to-home Apps for Climate Action contest, as well as the absolutely staggering amount of work that started even before “open data” caught on and has still continued to go strong.

What I was really enthusiastic to talk about in the session, however, was what role non-profits can play in the open data movement. It’s one thing to just make data open, and, as Michael Gurstein put it, solve or surmount the question of access. It’s quite a stretch to go from that to actual, tangible, meaningful social change. While it’s a good start, there’s plenty of other hard work to follow: not only making the data relevant and interesting and legible and understandable, but also connecting what the data says and means to us, to the people whose work is relevant to that data in some way — where I would categorize non-profits.

In other words, the next step is convening the conversation around datasets — a goal, I’m happy to say, has been echoed and identified by other open data advocates and those I’ve heard speak on the topic  from government. I’m ready to be wrong about this, but I imagine their challenge is, is what exactly goes into convening that conversation, given specific constraints they may be facing either legally, politically, or from existing internal culture in government.

A couple things I remember mentioning that I’ll link to in case the participants wanted to follow up with me on some things of interest:

• Green Building Brain — directed specifically to the attendee interested in visualizations related to architecture. This project, bootstrapped by the Vancouver Design Nerds, is an excellent resource. It isn’t open data in the sense that it’s not centered on a government service, but the Cascadia Green Building Council and a number of other organizations contribute data to it, and it is intended as a crowd-sourced resource for sustainability professionals and community groups, and definitely contributes a lot of values to the conversations about buildings and their surroundings.
• Geek feminism — I didn’t mention it in this session but I did talk to others over the course of the day, and I still think it’s extremely important even to this topic. One of the participants was a volunteer for the organizational Women Against Violence Against Women, and when she mentioned her non-profit, I reflected that data analysis can be very intimidating as an extremely technical and male-dominated field. Given my interest in acknowledging and incorporating local knowledge, I think the awareness of the open data movement by others working towards progressive causes, especially where data helps us have the conversation about what is actually happening in our cities and neighbourhoods, is vital. I don’t remember where I first heard about this blog, but chances are extremely good it has to do with one of the geekiest feminists in my life, one Leigh Honeywell, who, I just learned, contributes to writing there!
• Toronto Star Maps of the Week — one attendee to the session had a particular interest in war veterans, and I mentioned that this blog once posted a map of where in the Toronto area military recruits came from. I’m sad to see that the writer of the Maps of the Week blog, Patrick Cain has since moved on from the Toronto Star and is no longer posting, as I really enjoyed that work, and am grateful to The Star for sharing it. Fortunately, he seems to share data geekery on his blog regularly!
• Apps for Climate Action — bears repeating, given that the submitted apps are now open for voting on.

I may continue to add links to their post, as I remember what we spoke about. Thanks again to everyone who attended, and please let me know in the comments if you want to mention something else you enjoyed or wanted to know more about from the session.

This was my first time moderating a panel, and there was also a bit of an “X” factor with Northern Voice: this year’s conference was so much bigger than previously, and the schedule had been re-jigged so that there wasn’t a MooseCamp day, which is a format that I’ve discovered I’m much more comfortable with. The part I find most fun about that format is that it’s interactive, which means I get a much better sense of what the people in the room are interested and want to know, and they’re encouraged to ask questions right upfront.

I was glad to have asked at the beginning of the panel who had attended the Government 2.0 panel, because I was pleasantly surprised by how little overlap there was. In hindsight, if there were more time, I probably would also have tried to get a better sense in the room of how much experience people had with what urban planning is. Because it’s huge! It encompasses and touches so many aspects of daily life that for all I knew, one person thinks it has to do with zoning and permits and taxes, and someone else is thinking about architecture.

I did feel good about having provided a bit of the perspective I think I share with the panelists, which is the idea of planning as the mortar, if you will, between the major bricks of city building, filling in the gaps to try and make it cohesive for citizens, aka users of the city. Engineers, architects, social planners, economists, advocates, politicians — planners have the potential to take the lead in visioning an outcome to get the pieces to sit right using information available.

My choice of panelists was hampered by one thing: befitting an online operation, only one person from the PlanningPool editorial team was in Vancouver during Northern Voice, and she wasn’t available for Friday. That meant Daniella had to come in through Skype. The room set-up, thinking back, kinda stunk. Both video and audio were quite choppy and I could see many straining to hear her — and combined with a non-specialized microphone, I think it was pretty much impossible for many, which is a shame because she had such interesting things to say. Despite me working every last UBC connection I had in order to ensure I had a wired connection for the room, it turned out I was sharing with the live video streaming, and it didn’t work. The other lesson for me, I think, is if there’s a Skype presenter involved, don’t make them the first panelist.

One thing that set my panel apart from many others was that I invited people who probably had less experience blogging than most other speakers, but who had more (or a more specific type of) experience aside from blogging, and every one of the panelists was doing it in a way that didn’t have as much to do on personal blogging — a subtle but important distinction at Northern Voice. Even though sessions like Darren Barefoot‘s on social change may be significant for him in a professional context, he was still focused on how it related to individuals’ use of social media (take the in-house Facebook example). All three of my panelists were blogging in a community context — a community of professionals, citizens with certain interests, or an imagined general public.

Online Community Building for Offline Issues

There was one suggestion from the audience from Mike Klassen to PlanningPool, to “channel [their] inner Kunstler.” CityCaucus go into further depth about their comment in their blog post. First off, it probably flew over the heads of at least a few people in the room except the panelists and a few others, and even though this came at the very end, it probably called for an explanation. James Howard Kunstler is known in urban planning for being quite brash and provocative in furthering his hatred of  urban sprawl, the inhumanity of car-centric lifestyles and his pessimism towards the doomsday scenario presented by peak oil and climate change. The above comment essentially amounted to encouraging PlanningPool to write in a more forward and perhaps controversial fashion, as a suggestion for increasing traffic and comments.

There are many schools of thought on whether this is in fact the way to go about changing people’s minds, rooted in differing conceptions of how social change happens, theories of power and how we conduct ourselves on the Internet.

There’s also a very compelling technology question that comes into it as well, which has to do with Daniella’s statement that pieces tend to get a lot more involvement with authors post links to pieces on Facebook. As a planning student as well as someone interested in technology, I’m extremely sensitive to what kind of an impression I leave online, and I think most of the students in my program are too — though that may be more out of habit than thoughtfulness. There may not be an awareness of what’s qualitatively different about posting a fully identified and attributed comment to PlanningPool — an open, Google-indexed forum — rather than just commenting on Facebook, where comments are more likely to circle around peer groups. So I think there’s a technology literacy piece to encouraging planners in training.

As for being more Kunstler-esque, I can’t speak for the PlanningPool folks but I know for myself I’ve been inflammatory on the Internet more than enough for one lifetime to never want to do it again. Doing it for the sake of prompting discussion strikes me as running the risk of being oversimplistic, reductionist and possibly manipulative. That said, I’m not very good at intentionally pissing people off offline either, which some might argue is part of the problem — after all, plenty of people are more than happy to piss me off.

Thanks again to Daniella, Andrew and Jessica for stepping up and being great sports in the discussion; Roland for moderating; and everyone who gave their time in attending. All in all, I’m happy with it and hope to have a chance to engage deeper in the issues brought up in this panel. If you attended the panel at Northern Voice, what do you think could have made it better, or how else would you have wanted to see the question of urban planning broached? I’d love to hear your thoughts either in the comments.

The organizers for Northern Voice, Vancouver’s annual blogging conference have switched things up this year, opting for two full conference days rather than their usual one day each unconference-programmed session combination, and I’m grateful to them for accepting my session, titled “From Tweets to Plans: Online Conversation for Urban Planning.”

The vision for this panel had its origins in the panel I had the chance to participate in with Nancy Pepper, Vanessa Kay and Frances Bula at the SCARP Symposium on Resilience back in March. Northern Voice’s audience means that, instead of talking blogging at a planning conference, this time we are talking planning at a blogging conference.

Like last time, the temptation is always there to trot out the examples of neat web apps that show how things are not being done business as usual. At the SCARP Symposium I started with the big ideas and moved to the examples, and I got some feedback that this may have been better reversed. I think this will also be helpful as a narrative mirroring my own story of how I got interested in planning, even as I too am chipping away at the ideas to get at the heart of what planning actually is.

While professions such as public relations and marketing have been very directly impacted by the increasing numbers of people blogging and tweeting, the connection to urban planning isn’t perhaps as obvious — people talking online doesn’t seem like it’s going to change the way we pour concrete or make decisions on where and how we work with space. But it changes the way people interact with each other around the things they want from life — and at the bottom of it is, this what cities are for. I’m glad to get have three people on this panel with different perspectives and areas of experience:

• Daniella Fergusson, editor for PlanningPool, a group blog on planning issues, and soon to be Master’s Graduate at the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC
• Jessica Linzey, contributor to The Thunderbird and Master’s candidate at the School of Journalism at UBC
• Andrew Pask, Director, Vancouver Public Space Network (and their blog)

I’ve been wowed by each of these panelists in my work and interactions with them, and am looking forward to hearing their stories of how blogging can or already is shifting how we make ideas reality in our cities, and how we negotiate what’s in our plans versus what hits the ground. In fact, I can anticipate that the challenge of this panel will be to keep it on a single topic — there’s so much to be said on this topic really, from work on open government, social networking, and online organizing around causes, to hyperlocal blogging and the use of blogging in/for politics and advocacy work. At the same time, City Hall — what we typically associate with ‘planning activity’ — generally remains, for most part, an impassable black box.

That said, a huge part of this panel, of course, is YOU — whether you are going to make it to Northern Voice here in Vancouver or not. Do you have any stories to share about how the public, planning professionals and others involved in the planning process are can use blogging to get things done in different ways? Is there anything you’d be curious to learn or hear about?

(I can’t promise to squish everything into 30 minutes, but do leave a comment if you have a thought, and we can try and continue the conversation online!)

I was delighted with the questions that my talk was able to generate. I drew on many of the previous conversations I’d had with my fellow planning student about my research interests to frame this talk, and I think that helped me draw my focus towards the concerns that planners have in mind.

So I focused more on the “why’s” of using digital and social media rather than the “what’s”, although I certainly tried my best to delve a little into the fun, neat apps and ideas that are out there — namely, CycleTracks, Open Data, and that classic, EveryBlock. In hindsight, this might have been a poor strategy for changing people’s preconceptions, but I think it worked out OK for what it was – my primary concern is coming off as a technological determinist, to be honest, because there are plenty of those to go around; and I feel like it’s important to emphasize that both the fears and the excitement are rooted in equally legitimate observations.

Two questions / comments come to mind and are memorable to me:

• Ray Spaxman pointed out, as part of Nancy Pepper’s facilitated discussion of quality versus quantity in connections. I pointed out a few minutes later in my presentation that conversation is one of the things enabled by digital media – and that the outcome of the connection made, taken in aggregate, may have a different set of benefits than only high-quality connections. In some ways this is resembling the difference between bridging and bonding social capital. I’m also certainly not one to argue that we shouldn’t be aiming for quality connections, only that different benefits are available.
• Tony Dorcey noted that interactions with the public are often of three types: public information, public consultation, and public engagement (likely reference to my slide on the tasks of planning). If memory serves, he pointed out that online tools have been looked at more for those first two, information and consultation, and the results are mixed on the engagement front. I’m in agreement with him on the mixed results, but I’d also add that the public is less interested in the planner’s goals or intentions for a particular stage. The important lesson with the social web is that conversations are always happening, whether planners or cities are holding them or not; whether they are centralized on an official site or stretching on for 100+ comments on someone’s unofficial blog post on only a vaguely related topic. As I stated, these conversations are opportunities for engagement, involvement or learning.
• At the same time, I was also given the chance through Tony’s question to make a point that danah boyd forever lives in my heart for underscoring, time and again: these tools taken by themselves do not change power dynamics. (Municipal and government) planners are still, on the one hand, information curators and gatekeepers for decision-makers; and on the other, they may be either instruments of the state acting on citizens or partners in mitigating impacts.

What interests me is how the chips fall on relationships now. One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of Frances Bula, as I’ve mentioned, is that she’s got a Rolodex to die for, and she’s been building relationships and managing interests and perspectives long before it was popular. I think people in this capacity – to represent the legitimate interests and report the facts, in some ways, play a different role in a more broadly distributed reputation-centric and collaborative environment. I find some of what she said really fascinating – that she’d never go out of her way to burn someone in her writing, and she’d give the people she wrote about warning if she could tell people would get upset at something a person had stated and which she would quote. that’s the kind of forthright integrity that I hope underpins the move towards accountability and transparency, through things like the open data movement.

I wasn’t able to give a lot of air-time to resilience — and to be honest, I don’t know a heck of a lot about it — but the idea of planning a city that’s responsive and flexible requires a nervous system, and this is the rudimentary start to establishing that, and it is one part — certainly not the only part — of giving our cities the quality of information to potentially be resilient.

(I am also writing a legal paper about transparency in public participation planning in a couple weeks, so I’ll get a lot more real on this soon enough, don’t you worry.

Thanks again to PlanningPool for inviting me to speak, as well as my fellow students who all worked so hard to put this event on!

If you attended the talk by any chance, I’d love to get feedback on what worked for you and what didn’t about my presentation. Was there something you were expecting that you would have liked to have seen in it? Please leave a comment below, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

The panel is entitled “Digital Media: Communication and Engagement for Resilience”:

Engaged, informed and inspired citizens are a critical ingredient for urban resilience in the face of climate change or any other challenge. While the democratization of city planning is increasingly recognized within the profession as a laudable goal, very few planning organizations are yet making full use of the tremendous communication and engagement opportunity represented by blogs and other digital media.

Present and future community planners, urban designers and policymakers attending this symposium are likely to need the skills of written communication and engagement through online media. While graduate training in planning prepares students to be competent academic/bureaucratic report writers, engaging citizens about urban issues using new media like blogs involves a different awareness and skills!

I’ll be doing a 10-minute presentation. But I’m really more excited about the others on the panel: Frances Bula, running hands-down one of the most interesting community blogs in the city, tying the old(er) world of community and civic engagement with the newfangled methods through her fiercely interesting writing, both online and in various print outlets; and Nancy Pepper, a second-year SCARP student who has a theatre background and will be demonstrating it with a hands-on facilitation. Two women I’m incredibly flatted to share a stage with!

Thanks to the editors of PlanningPool for inviting me to speak! My current thoughts on what to speak about are:

• situating the role of social media in public engagement in planning
• challenges and opportunities in:
  • using social media for general outreach
  • nurturing communities around municipal open data

Based on the conversations I had at CAPS (which I still have a post in draft to discuss! ), I get the feeling that there’s a lot of anxiety and tension around the tendency for information overload that is part and parcel of using social media, and that planners remain highly skeptical of its value as a result of their experiences using it in their personal lives.

What I’ve been trying to focus on in those discussions is really talking about the why of using social media (as people already understand it) in planning, without even getting into the gory details of the what. To me, it’s really about solidifying those first principles around transparency and leveraging networks as a way in which people make things happen.

For more information and registering to attend, check out the Symposium’s website.