About three years ago, prior to entering UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, I had a chance to attend a demonstration of the co-design method pioneered by architect Stanley King. This article will give a brief rundown of the major activities involved in a co-design process, This will be followed by some links to other resources about co-design, examples of projects that have used the co-design method, and how King is moving forward with integrating co-design methods into current work.

What is Co-Design?

Broadly speaking, co-design brings members of the public together with artist-facilitators to dialogue and collaboratively produce a community vision. These visions can guide and inform planning and design activities as a project unfolds. Stanley King has been using this method with communities since 1971 through The Co-Design Group, an informal association of architects, designers and researchers based in western Canada.

The bulk of these activities occur during an event commonly known as a co-design workshop (although, depending of course on the circumstances of the project, this may be paired with other activities such as an ideas fair). Members of the public are invited to the workshop – often, a day-long event. As with many participatory activities, broad representation — by age, background, activity — is key, although groups within the broader community may need special consideration.
As with all dialogues and participatory activities, setting expectations and boundaries is key. As explained in the report of the use of co-design in Vancouver’s Woodwards Project:

Participants were asked to observe 3 rules during the visioning:

1. Speak for yourself – say “I” not “We”- let others speak for themselves.

2. Avoid negative criticism – if you don’t like an idea suggest your alternative.

3. Don’t attempt solutions – think of the life of the place, consider possibilities.

Co-design Agenda

A co-design workshop often starts with a Site visit and Walkabout, allowing the facilitators and members of the community to jointly learn or re-discovering salient features of the site, like lighting, topography or existing infrastructure.

With the atmosphere of the space fresh in everyone’s mind, the public is asked to brainstorm an Activity Timeline. As a group, the public discusses what kinds of activities they envision taking place in the space over the course of a day. I sometimes refer to this as, “A Day In the Life.” This brainstorming serves as an opportunity for people to give voice, in a large-group setting, to how a place would fit into their daily lives.

Next comes what is referred to as the Image Creation phase, and the heart of the co-design experience. The artist facilitators take what is said in the brainstorm and categorize it into general guiding themes that they will be focusing on for their drawing. Members of the public are then broken up into smaller groups and assigned to work with the artist-faclitators on those themes. The artists then begin to sketch an image of the place, in close discussion with their group as they discuss specifics. It can often result in a dialogue process rooted in the constructive: what should be here? What will the people here be doing, and how will they be doing it? (Artists, King notes, cannot draw absences — at best they can draw two desired things co-existing.)

Once all the groups have completed their images, the specific elements that have been included and highlighted in the image are listed. The images are displayed and the larger group is invited to view all the images produced and to express their preferences for the qualities and features in the images, as well as their suggestions for what might make them work or not work in the particular place.

Co-Design in Action

• This site from the City of Vancouver has three co-design reports for the Woodward’s Project in Vancouver, and can give you a good idea of the output of a co-design process as well as the way a co-design workshop might be coordinated with other community engagement activities.
• I was fortunate to get to see King and the artist facilitators at work as part of my course work focused on a community visioning process for Britannia Community Centre in Vancouver. See him speaking about co-design in this video on the Britannia community engagement process. (Disclaimer: I shot and edited this along with two colleagues in my Multimedia for Planning Engagement class in 2010, and also participated as a student in the urban design class.)
• This video is from Stanley King’s work on the Little Mountain Housing Project. It has been edited together by a local community group and provides an overview of the workshop and shows some of the resulting images. (Stanley himself appears 7:53 into the video.) The community’s groups description of the video highlights an important point that is true of all participatory tools — that what happens during a co-design process needs to be integrated and followed-up in a planning and development process.
• My blog post of a co-design demonstration from 2009 also contains some images of the consensus process where people vote on the features in the images.
• Here is a photoset of images from an adaptation of the co-design workshop adapted for the City of Vancouver’s Transportation 2040 transportation plan update public consultation activity.
• See more about the co-design method in this 1973 film called Chairs For Lovers. (Note: Dial up the National Film Board nostalgia.)

Co-Design Moving Forward

Stanley King and his colleague Susan Ng Cheung are applying their experiences with co-design to better engaging youth in planning activities. They recently released a book called Youth Manual for Sustainable Design:

Together they created a Co-Design Youth Program to help youth participate in the ecological design of the spaces they will ultimately inherit. Recently, the program has enabled youth to participate in school garden design, architectural design of a waterfront and also in transportation planning. Currently, Stanley and Susan are researching the connection between co-design and the ecological interactions of communities.

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of the method, because I think people inhabit a different frame of mind when they are in engaged in constructive processes of making things together in addition to the usual talking, discussing and deliberating.
It’s been pointed out to me that it may be challenging to some for relegating planners in a seemingly passive role, of recording and notetaking the public’s interests rather than more actively applying planning skill. I would respond that by hypothesizing that an awful lot happens in those conversations while the artist-facilitator is drawing. Furthermore, I’d be interested to see what role the images created in the process might have in identifying community assets for implementing what is brainstormed, and coordinating that with more formal activities involving developers, architects, designers and planners.

I’m absolutely thrilled — on the one hand, for the app itself, which I’ve had the joy of watching proceed from its early days to its current iteration, simple, effective yet inviting; and on the other, the amount of interest for the app has absolutely blown me away. Todd and Tylor have received a bunch of coverage from media. Most of all, I’ve really enjoyed going through the comments to see how it’s received from TransLink transit-goers. But perhaps most telling about the appeal of This is Our Stop, is that the app hasn’t even been out of launch a week and, astoundingly, it’s already been replicated for Toronto through the site MyStop.to. Denim and Steel has a first week round-up with links to all of that coverage, as well as a good selection of some of the comments people have been leaving at bus stops through TIOS.

It’s been hard to keep the smile off my face when I think about this. It seems just like yesterday, I was at an open data hackathon at the Vancouver Archives, grabbing a sharpie and a piece of flip chart paper, and dragging Richard into the lobby, determined to finally put down on paper the idea I’d had bouncing around in my head for months in order to interact with other people taking the bus waiting at their stops.

Here are three quick thoughts on what I really enjoy about both the app itself and the process through which it has unfolded.

1. Making community conversations accessible

Adopt-a-Stop was originally built on my viewing bus stop numbers act as a low-tech, SMS-friendly form of GPS. I was also heavily inspired by now-defunct Block Chalk, a tool that used graffiti as an analogy for geo-located messaging. I’m deeply interested in tools and methods that allow us to transcend time and space in telling and hearing our collective stories. Learning more about the people that make their lives in our neighbourhoods, cities and region feels like a first step to better connecting to the people in our communities, in all their diverse backgrounds, goals and aspirations. (This is Our Stop references this desire succinctly: “Give voice to the secret lives of your favourite bus stops.”)

The concept is particularly close to my heart because I think, one the one hand, transit spaces are incredibly rich yet vastly misunderstood spaces (as I think this cultural geography paper starts to capture really well); and on the other, because public transportation (in North America) is seen extremely negatively in contrast to other modes of transportation — often because of other people. I don’t think that’s true, and I know that others don’t either.

Code re-use as inter-city learning — open data and open source

TransLink’s open data consists of (among many other things) the GPS coordinates and 5-digit codes for all the buses operated by Coast Mountain Bus Company, TransLink’s operating subsidiary. The fact that this data is made available in the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) — which has become a de-facto standard for transit schedule information (see this excellent post at Xconomy on the development and growth of GTFS) means that the underlying code for This Is Our Stop can be re-used to deploy a system using the bus stop and route information of just about any other transit system with data in the GTFS format. That’s pretty cool — over 300 systems around the world cool, in fact. That doesn’t mean all the work is done for getting the system elsewhere — but it does make it much easier for those who are knowledgeable and willing to put in the elbowgrease to get it right for their system and city.

Cities have historically learned and taken a lot of inspiration from each other. There’s now a lot of interest in creating infrastructures that enable cities to swap tools and methods that allow residents to better understand, use and thrive in cities (Civic Commons is I believe only one of many such projects), in addition to the traditional systems that have supported this (I’m thinking professional associations, conferences, scholarship, etc.)

Start small, really well

Another reason I’m happy that Todd and Tylor have taken this on is because they really get (way better than I do) one of the guiding rules of open source tools: to get an app of the ground by doing a small number or even one thing really well, and to move from there once people have expressed interest in it or are willing to commit effort or resources into extending it. (I’m also kind of fascinated by how Todd and Tylor have framed it as “niche social networking” — a concept that I don’t think was quite as popular back in 2009 but which appears to be quite common now.)

Perhaps it’s not a perfect analogy, but as I learned at the Tactical Urbanism talk at the American Planning Association session this year, there is growing interest in doing more planning work this way too. As transportation planning hero Janette Sadik-Khan has advocated, start off with a temporary trial or pilot (for, say, reconfiguring a street, or re-purposing an underutilized space) that shows what is possible and takes advantage of what makes sense for that place; and if it proves successful enough to attract support and buy-in, only then figure out the model for making it permanent. I think it really taps into the experiential aspect that’s sometimes required for people to fully grasp the value of a proposal. Seeing (and possibly sitting in or walking through) is believing.

Another unofficial maxim of open source is to “scratch your own itch” — in other words, develop apps that solve problems that you yourself want to see solved. I’m unendingly heartened that others are wondering what the people around them are thinking and feeling and want to use an app to share that too. Thanks again to Tylor and Todd for making what probably started off as a flight of whimsy at a bus stop into awesome reality!

As I tweeted, there’s still plenty of ways to extend TIOS — such as making the service available to non-smartphone users through SMS (perhaps using Twitter as an intermediary in order to avoid the requirement of a text message gateway). Here’s hoping it gets a chance to happen!

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!

#myresearch looks at how planning orgs have used & understand Twitter for public engagement on sustainability issues.

Why does Twitter matter for planning?

I’ve asked this question for a pretty good long while, as a consequence of not only using Twitter as I was learning about transit and planning, but also helping instigate Transit Camp (in 2007), learning about transit advocacy through the Vancouver Public Space Network (2009), reading bloggers and those familiar with planning (like Stephen Rees, Robert Goodspeed, Richard Layman, and countless others now that urban issues are enjoying a lot of attention — not to mention, the crew on Tumblr), and just tweeting what I was seeing and why I care about the experience of transit. I’ve previously spoken about this research at Barcamp a few years back, when I was just starting in the planning program.

As I’ve gone through planning school, I realized that I think planners are generally an awesome, fascinating and thoughtful bunch. But focusing solely on what they do or don’t do with technology wasn’t really squaring well with my interests in the social impacts of technology broadly. Planners think about technology through the lens of planning as work — so planners tend to use the frame “planning support software.” Planning is complex work, and technology helps them do many parts of it in more expedient, effective ways; so there’s a rich body of work around the use of different technologies (like PPGIS) for engaging the public on planning issues. But the approaches are generally still focused on practice — not on understanding how the lifeworld of the people engaged in using Twitter might help us reconsider public engagement.

For the most part, I operate on the assumption that citizens don’t see planning the way planners see it (by necessity). When the public talks about things that are relevant to urban planning on Twitter, they may or may not be variously interested in venting, gallows humour, letting off steam, sharing anecdotes, or getting to the point of becoming activists, advocates, and wanting to have some say in shaping the places that mean something to them. There’s maybe also some daring to hope, sometimes, that when we tell our story, that we’re not only coping through telling, but also hoping that something of our day-to-day experience could have some impact on decisions about what comes next.

Moreover, for those of us using social media regularly and integrating it with our offline lives (yes, it’s a false, long-standing dichotomy), it exposes us to multiple perspectives of the systems that we both participate in and are constrained by — be they social, economic, cultural, physical or otherwise. The affective dimension of the experience (which others have written very richly and persuasively about) is something we’re more able and (I argue) more compelled to voice and connect on, now, in ways that involved significant logistical challenges previously. This has potential for planning, but it’s not immediately obvious and there are plenty of challenges involved for the planner that wants to meaningfully involve Twitter in official work.

Twitter conversations about transit is a rich example of how tweeting — something pretty small and self-interested as far as doing things goes — might be interpreted as something bigger, more impactful and significant. To what extent are those persons working in and making decisions about transit¹, seeing or understanding what this means to citizens (or being prevented, in various ways, from doing so), and what it could mean for their work? And what does this have to tell about how we talk about all issues related to sustainability, more generally, beyond transit? Those two questions, in a nutshell, are driving my thesis.

…and why Twitter?

On a somewhat practical level, there’s the simple fact that Twitter is slightly easier to work with than Facebook (there is some criticism of that, and I’ll grant it as a limitation). But on the other, there is, I think, a bit more of a sense of public-ness to Twitter. If you are posting publicly, using hashtags, and using Twitter in a way that nurtures any kind of notion of a public self, you will get people you don’t know messaging you, even if it’s just spam. Not everyone reacts well to it. (See StealthMountain, a cheeky Twitterbot provoking people with spelling corrections and auto-favoriting the snarky results.) That’s always been the exciting part of Twitter to me — that you get mentioned or retweeted (and sometimes, minsterpreted) by people who don’t know where you are coming from, and who are genuinely seeing what you say through their slice of experience, their interests, their bias. And as jarring as that is to experience sometimes, to feel that 140 character like a brick wall in your throat, some hope always persists that the conversation might turn into meaningful connecting.

I contrast that with my very recent experiences with Facebook, where I see in my News Feed my friends commenting on their friends posts — yet I’m not able to weigh in on the thread due to the original poster’s privacy settings. That drives me bonkers, frankly, to the point where I consider changing my settings so that I can’t see posts that I can’t myself comment on. It’s not all butterflies and roses on Twitter — I’ve broken some etiquette on responding to private accounts with my public account — but there is a feeling that it’s a semi-regular occurrence, that it happens, and that it is part of using the tool. The only places Facebook shows me people I don’t know, are in Events and sometimes, very rarely, in groups. (That said, what I find it most valuable for by far is showing me the sides I haven’t seen of the people I do know — and these are often sides that they might not feel so willing to share on Twitter, if they even use it at all.)

Progress

For a really, really long time, I considered but avoided making this topic the focus of my thesis for a whole slew of reasons, some involving how little work there was on it. Circumstances evolved, there are others doing work in this from a planning perspective, and now I’m committed whole hog to doing something interesting with this. I’m hoping to continue blogging the research as it forms beneath my feet (or, as the case may be, beneath my fingers, as I write it).

¹ — And lest you think this is simple, there are a lot of them. Municipal governments, regional transportation bodies, provincial ministries, the federal government, entities doing economic development…all have a stake in what money goes where, to provide mobility for certain people doing different stuff.

Jack Mason, an IBMer working on the IBM Smarter Cities Tumblr, wrote a couple weeks ago:

As an IBMer working on Smarter Cities — and a New Yorker for much of my adult life — I’d like to observe that Adam Greenfield doesn’t know me, my motivations, or those of the thousands of colleagues who are dedicated their lives and careers towards the goal of enabling cities, and urban citizens, to become smarter.

Jack Mason later re-blogged his comment on his personal Tumblr which is Disqus-enabled, and further expanded:

Adam: You suggested that businesses that are working on helping cities become smarter are essentially heartless…lacking the love and appreciation of these places that you, presumably, hold. I categorically reject that sweeping, unsupported and contentious assertion. Just as the world is increasingly becoming urbanized, the vast majority of the people in organizations working on intelligent cities have a lifelong relationship with these same places, and a personal, human interest in seeing the cities that they grew up in or call home thrive. Your argument falls right on its face, and that’s why I think people should watch the video and come to their own conclusion on whether your assessment is either fair, accurate or true.

As a former IBMer (16 months at the Toronto IBM Software Development Group) and an unabashed fan of Greenfield’s work and approach to cities, these strongly-worded responses piqued my interest.

Mason was responding to comments Mr. Greenfield made in his talk at the PICNIC conference, entitled, “Another City is Possible.” In the interests of giving full context, I not only watched all of Adam’s talk (available here), I’ve also gone to the trouble of transcribing the section that is summarized in that original blurb, for those of you who are curious but without 25 minutes to spare. It’s a little long but I think it’s very helpful in teasing out the nuance of not only Adam’s point, but the heart of what the IBMer was expressing.

Who are the institutions who are so deeply invested in this rhetoric, who have so much to gain or to lose by ensuring that humanity as an urban species invests in the smart city? If you are in this room, you will probably not be surprised that the institutional players are people like IBM, Cisco, and Siemens. These are people who are in business — not a surprise, in the business of technology. At best they may be system integrators. They might even describe themselves as the missing link between the real estate and technology sectors —this is verbatim, taken from Living PlanIT, the firm building in the Portuguese valley.

I want to make it clear that I’m not faulting these institutions, these enterprises, for being enterprises — they have a role to play in the world, they have a valuable role to play in the world. But I do think it’s interesting and perhaps unfortunate that so much of our urban future is being predicated on the actions and activities of institutions that probably don’t have very much of a sense for design; certainly, as we’ll see, do not have that much of a sense for urbanism, and — I’m going to say this in a very small voice — probably do not love the places they are developing for; probably have never thought about the idea of love, and the idea of a city, and how these things might relate to one other. And my assertion to you is that these things go together very well inindeed as a matter of fact, if you’re thinking about cities in the absence of an affirmative sense of love for the place, you’re probably missing a lot of what makes that city valuable, and most of what makes it a generator of value.

First off, I get what Jack is feeling. As a lifetime inhabitant of Vancouver, one of the most planner-friendly cities out there (evidence: we name streets after them), before I went to planning school and engaged deeply with literature on urbanism, I scoffed at the hoity-toity idea that anyone could tell me anything about the city I grew up in that I didn’t already know, or that the future I desired for my city was rooted in anything less than pure love. Sometimes I still feel that way, even as I realize how rounded my understanding and appreciation of Vancouver has become in the past 2 years.

But I fundamentally think Mr. Greenfield has a point, which I would re-state in the form of the following questions. I don’t do this because I deny the love of New York as place held by Jack or his colleagues. But because it comes back to the first principles and DNA of the organizations in question, not what the individuals in those organizations hold to be central, vital and true.

1. Does IBM (or other organization) respect the spontaneous, the emergent, and the community-driven in addition to the activities and units which constitute the native tongue of the governments with whom IBM and the enterprises like it can most readily identify with?
2. Does IBM (or other organization) prioritize the inclusive aims of design, such as supporting choice and conviviality in the course of everyday life for end-users, ordinary citizens and residents, and lead through a process geared towards that outcome? Have their clients empowered them to prioritize these values in pursuit of their work?

While the answer to these questions will answer the question posed in the title of this blog post, I think it’s instructive to determine whether questions like this were asked at all.

What I’ve come to understand about loving cities is that there are two sides to the sentiment. There is an appreciative definition of love — the awe and recognition of the way the physical characteristics of a place and the spirit of the people doing what they do best just mesh. ¹

But there is also an active definition — to love in the sense of promulgating, furthering, extending, nurturing to self-replicate. It means appreciating the interlocking patterns in ways that support the full diversity of a space’s users, needs and interests. It means to love not only the city that one knows, but the city as defined by those one disagrees with, maybe even those one despises — and to be at very least aware of it in the thick of defining an intervention, as a first crack at anticipating consequences. I don’t think it’s wrong to doubt whether business-oriented interests have the capacity to consider — nay, to love² — a city in this way, and to ask that they should as they shape our experience of urban space.

So the relevant question becomes not whether one loves, but how that love is informing the judgments about what we want in the future city. The data we can gather can tell us how we might make certain changes, but not which are the right changes to make. The history of urban planning is littered with good intentions that have left their mark in our collective space and memory. This is what I heard in Adam Greenfield’s talk.

(You may also be interested in my previous conversation on this blog with the founder of Living PlanIT.)

¹ — OK, so just how obvious is it that I’ve been (slowly) reading “Timeless Way of Building” by Christopher Alexander?

² — For a while I almost forgot that love has been the centre of my practice.

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.

We watched on TV. A camera perched somewhere high above the street showed us the scene at the Fanzone on Georgia Street. Wall-to-wall people. We’re glad we’re not there, we murmured.

It was game 5 of the Stanley Playoffs, in Vancouver. I was at the Hurricane Grill in Yaletown — the first bar we’d happened upon showing the game when we hopped off our Aquabus from Granville Island — and I was with a group of urban planning PhD students visiting for a colloquium hosted by profs at my program. Up until now, my investment in the hockey game had been restricted to asking, “What’s the score?” when I passed upon someone transfixed by the sight of little green-blue men scrambling on a white screen for a fast-moving speck of dust. I clapped minimally and made small talk with the other students, asking what their area of focus was and where they’d come from. I know what an icing call is, but I really have little interest in Canucks bandwagonning.

Later, we walked down the Seawall to the Chinatown night market. “Where’s the stadium?” those visiting students asked me. “Where are those crowds?”

Over there, I pointed, vaguely northeast. About … 5 or 6 blocks that way? We later meandered through the downtown eastside — I mistakenly led the group around the block in search of the new 14 Hastings bus and settled for loading them onto a 7 Dunbar instead.

I tracked the mood in the small group I was with, as it shifted over the course of evening. There was a lot of high-fiving going on for the game, of course — people passing us on foot, jubilant after a win on home ice. Parts of our group were nervous but still desiring to see, feel, experience Vancouver. Others in the group wanted to see where the action was and be on the street — the closest we’d come was walking down Abbott near GM Place, but there was ambivalence — the desire to be part of the crowd’s energy, but fear of what it might become as well.

A couple of us mentioned the 1994 riots in passing. There was a sense that we were missing something, but also uncertainty about whether it was something worth missing, or something we would regret. We settled for beers at the Alibi Room, in the basement, the game crowd having long moved on. I left the group waiting in line at the Fortune Sound Club, took my trolley bus the 20 blocks home in my quiet residential neighbourhood, and tucked myself into bed without a care in the world.

These thoughts made watching the actual events of Game 7 that much more startling. To learn that all the civility and positivity of the celebrations would prove to be a rouse was a huge letdown. In its place, broadcast to a city in shock, what people claimed Vancouverites were really made of. Opportunistic, violent, disrespectful displays — doing it for the lolz, mugging for the cameras, the mockery of earned fame.

I agree with everything Alexandra Samuel says in her blog post at HBR.org about what we say about citizen surveillance when we condone its use for this horrific event. I think the key insight and the harsh lesson is that while the riots were not, collectively,  our fault — we have the actual instigators to thank for that, whether they number in the hundreds or the thousands — they are our responsibility to learn from, and to make sure never happen again. All the disowning and finger-pointing in the world based on age, gender, etc. is not going to get the root of the issues and to solve it. Only deep learning and reflection will.

There is so much speculation flying around as to the cause of this. I’m in no position to add to it, but this is the best and most level-headed thing I’ve read on the topic.

I am floored by the outpouring of support for businesses, and social media has proven instrumental in helping people organize themselves into volunteer clean-up crews. I’m also amazed at the stories we are seeing coming out of people who tried to stand up to the looting, smashing crowds. I think Vancouver’s fire and police services did their best, though they were not without fault. And finally, the whole trick with technologies and norms like citizen surveillance is that we can’t just let the cat of the bag when we think we are motivated by it being right. Jonathan Zittrain has made this argument fabulously (this summary makes reference to hockey riots in Montreal in 2008). It will be deployed on us when we like it this time — if we condone its use now, who will be the one to say it is right or wrong next time?

Anyway, getting off social media now sounds like a fantastic idea.

CrowdSourced City: the SFU City Presentation

This event was put on by the SFU City program. Attendance at the session appeared somewhat poorly forecast by the organizers — many attendees, such as myself, were standing behind the back row of seats and sitting on steps and in aisles, pushing the limits on the fire code. I also recall being somewhat surprised by how slim the turnout was from those who I would consider to have more of a tech background than an urban planning background. I was delighted to see people like Stanley King not only listening in but commenting too — his work on inclusive and open processes for urban design are low-tech but incredibly empowering, and it’s precisely that spirit that I’d want to see tech tools infused with for the future.

This event consisted primarily of walkthroughs and presentations from the makers of three tools: CrowdFlower, Crowdbrite, and PlaceSpeak.

CrowdFlower told the story of its work collaborating with Ushahidi, Mission 4636, and a handful of other projects and initiatives to support relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti last year. (They have a retrospective post examining this work on CrowdFlower’s blog.) I walked in having missed the first half of this presentation, but from what I can gather on their website, CrowdFlower works on mobilizing individuals to contribute effort in the form of incentivized “micro-tasks”, and have created a platform to regularly and repeatedly engaging large numbers of people in simple tasks, and to coordinate that work into a cohesive whole. Though I haven’t had any exposure with to it, offhand it sounds a little like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Crowdbrite presented next. Crowdbrite’s CEO, Darin Dinsmore, started by declaring that public hearings are a huge problem and for almost everyone involved — they put citizens in awkward positions and waste great deal of people’s time, resulting in little if any significant progress for anyone. At one point, Darin spoke of how he did some back-of-a-napkin math on how many city staff were being paid to sit for the length of a public hearing and pointed out that thousands of dollars were going into a meeting format that hadn’t been tweaked or changed for decades. The Crowdbrite platform aims to save time by allowing the public’s feedback to be collected online, with references to what it is they are commenting on, be it a map or a plan. The key to their interface is the idea of the “virtual stickynote”, where people can submit their comments. Other users of the system can then respond to those comments, and they can also be compiled into reports. It has the potential to save huge amounts of time and resources which are currently spent on transcription and processing costs. Darin also wisely spoke that it is just a tool — and that its success is still dependent on a clear and well thought-through engagement process.

PlaceSpeak was the last up. Their public engagement platform is based on the perspective that what you say about an issue is connected to where you live. The site uses various geo-verification techniques to let you “claim” where you live and to associate that location, in a fashion accessible only to the City and not to the general public, with what one says online. Since this session, the site’s plug-in has been integrated with the TalkVancouver.com online public forum site. Out of all the tools, PlaceSpeak struck me as being most interesting in terms of there being a clearer connection to community-based activity. But I also voiced a concern, that where I live now may only scratch the surface of the places I care about. I think there’s a whole can of worms involved, which I won’t crack open here and now, but there were a few people who voiced agreement with me on this point. PlaceSpeak has also since launched a contest called Tag Your Hood.

CrowdCity: the Unconference Session at Open Gov West 2011

I was really intrigued by some of the questions I was discussing with people after the Crowdsourced City session in Vancouver, so I borrowed the title of the session and topics for an unconference session at Open Gov West in Portland, because I felt like it would be a topic of interest for people in attendance there. Despite a few bumps, I hope it was an informative session.

I was hampered by a few things at OGW 2011 which, to me, made the session not all that it could have been. One big piece was that there was no projector in the tent, which meant no hands-on look at any of the three platforms, and unfortunately I wasn’t familiar enough with the three of them to answer questions.

The bigger challenge was a bit of a weirder one, which was understanding that the audience at the SFU City session was primarily planners — people who understood the legal requirements and the functional frustrations of public consultation, and who saw that activity within a larger process. The audience at Open Gov West was looking at everything as an entirely different group. Some of them were government staff but who worked outside of planning. Some of them were from municipalities smaller (and, if David Eaves is to be believed, more agile in rolling out change) than places like Vancouver. To them, the technology was, frankly, completely uninteresting.

And I can understand that. I think the technology that is most interesting and cutting edge is always going to be 5 steps ahead of the technology that is sanctioned or has enough process around it to be comfortable for government. I also think the fact that no one had seen the technologies in question also hampered the discussion a great deal, and that was a combination of me being ill-prepared and just the nature of the particular beast that day.

The biggest lesson for me is that I’m making a nice cozy brain-niche studying the differences between how staff view public engagement in planning, and how the public views those attempts at engagement — but it’s something I need to work harder at articulating for myself, because my work in open government and public engagement in planning is bringing me in contact with different audiences who fundamentally care about different things.

The discussion in this session picked up a bit when I talked about something which really matters to me, which is the fact that all three of these tools appear — it’s early days, granted — to be built to work within what I would consider to be a traditional government procurement process. I don’t know nearly enough about RFP processes to say this is problematic, but looking at government budgets, it doesn’t seem to me that smaller places have the money to buy these kinds of technologies — their need to effectively engage their citizens online is no less pressing. What might open source models bring to this space, or affect how companies envision developing technology for government use? How do models like Code for America, or other cross-gov partnerships (like OpenPlans’ OpenTripPlanner), fit into this space? This was the conversation I personally felt was missing from the SFU City session, and which I was glad to have been able to voice (though in a limited way) at Open Gov West 2011.

Hoping to continue these kinds of conversations with those working in planning in Vancouver, on-line but hopefully off-line as well!

I did want to highlight some particularly memorable and helpful conversations:

• I met Frank Hebbert. Cool chap doing some really awesome shiznit!
• I met Susan Bregman, editor of The Transit Wire, and we had a great time talking shop of all sorts — she’s working on some excellent research around social media and transit, and I really valued getting to hear her perspective.
• I caught up with the APA Planning Technology Division crew both at the PlanningTech@DUSP event, and at their meeting at the conference. I threw in my two cents and heard a bit more about the ins-and-outs of engaging planners around technology. At the former, I met some other students who are working on really neat topics on planning and technology who seem to have certainly had some comparable experiences to my own in the planning academy. It was almost cathartic, actually.
• Met some awesome Code for America folk and hung out at their booth a little bit. One of them will be speaking at Open Gov West in Portland in May, which I am helping convene as a volunteer, so that was also really neat.
• Beers in Beantown was the sequel to last year’s unstructured panel on technology and “disruptions in planning,” but this year I got to interact at a little more depth with Jason Lally, which was great. There were people there who remembered me and who I also remembered too! I was really enthused by the ideas the panelists presented, and welcomed the chance to build on some of my own thinking and share those thoughts with the cloud. (Update [05/03/2011]: The first half of the video for this session has now been posted to the PlaceMatters Blog.)
• As with last year, I indulged in a technology training session at the APA: this year, it was a GIS-enabled charrettes session focusing on using CommunityViz by the fine folks at Placeways. I’m quite a GIS lightweight (spatially illiterate, you might even say), but this session definitely got me dreaming of some neat possible integrations…
• I also shared a few stories with Chris Haller (who also writes the Engaging Cities site) working the APA Twitter booth.
• (and please don’t take offense if I haven’t mentioned you, I haven’t rifled through the stack of business cards in my bag yet either.)

Putting faces to so many avatars, websites and names was an incredible experience. Being at the end of the semester and nearing (with any luck!) the end of my degree, it’s giving me a lot of thought as to what route I see myself going down when my degree comes to a close. More academia / research? Applying for fellowships to roll up balls of project-based awesome? Working as a consultant or at a non-profit? Settling down in the local or provincial government and working for open gov from the inside (like so many other brave souls)? All have some appeal in one way or another.

This quote from an interview with Alex Steffen struck me as somewhat illustrative of my predicament:

How do we talk about those kinds of changes, making clear that they’re something to pay attention to but keeping a realistic perspective on the current landscape? What’s possible is moving really quickly, but what is reality is still largely unchanged.

Whether it’s open government data, service design, transportation data collection, social media for storytelling in planning, citizen science for community movements on sustainability…the theme of transition has been weighing heavy on my mind. That we are twisting and flexing new muscles under the cocoon of what we have always done. The security of staying inside continues to be alluring, even as the tension, the urge to stretch out, mounts. I’m excited to be part of so many cool, neat, new things, even as I bow my head to good old path dependency.

It’s definitely a blessing though, because there was so much to write about from yesterday’s PlanningTech@DUSP event that I was way, way too pooped to do before I dropped onto the air mattress to sleep the slumber of the jetlagged and in-transit-for-20-hours.

Noteworthy:

• In the first part of the afternoon, I started off in the Planning Engagement Innovations session to hear Jennifer Evans-Cowley talk about her social media engagement with the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan process. Super-interesting stuff, especially since the approach she and her team took with the SNAPPATX outreach was right along the lines of what I find most interesting about social media: using Twitter to pick out people who are thinking about the things that relate to planning as they are immersed in that activity, rather than trying to engage them on the timeline of the policy-makers, when it’s not a pressing issue. (More on this later in the post.)
• PlaceMatters‘ demo of their Wii-whiteboard inspired map engagement exercise was awesome and geeky in all the right ways. It was part of a really great session overall looking at scenario planning, which I’ve always been interested in but so far know very little about. One was Tim Reardon’s overview of the Boston Metro’s MetroFuture process, and the second one was about some really intense and super-interesting climate adaptation work in Florida.
• Ezra Glenn’s session on dashboards in planning was really interesting too. He had a wicked, engaging and hilarious approach that was wonderfully executed and seemed to jive really well with his personality and energy. It definitely reminded me of Matthew Alexander’s Plan For Comedy session a couple years back, because it seems like a challenge to make what planners do funny, and Ezra definitely proved that it can in fact be done, with excellent results. Especially if the aim is to critique planning-as-usual/typical.

Aside from that, it’s just been magnificent to meet in person, and catch up with, people whose work I’ve been following and admiring from afar for a while, like Open Plans and Code for America, or just those at the edge of my awareness, like Chris Haller and Hazel Borys.

Promoting Open Gov West in Portland has been a great excuse to chat some people up at the Exhibition too, which I definitely would not have done otherwise.

That ‘theory of engagement’ which overlaps with Jennifer Evan Cowley’s approach was also a big part of the conversation I had with Max Ogden today from Code for America, who I would meet and have an awesome time talking with, at their booth at the APA Conference Exhibition the next day. Bottom line? Those are teachable moments. They might not always end the way you want them to, granted. Case in point, as Jennifer put it: would you want to be talking to someone in a restaurant and have your neighbor tap your shoulder and ask, “Would you be interested in learning more about the regional transportation planning process?” There is a hint of the ‘annoying buzz marketing’ potential. But the opportunities to connect the long-term with the recent, memorable past feel like they have a certain richness to them, for prompting empathy and the understanding and, well, even faith, that the problems we face can be overcome, and that someone is thinking about those problems.

I’m a little surprised to see how full my calendar is between sessions and chatting people both at and outside the conference. I’m also have a wonderful time learning about Boston’s transit system, though things are still surprising me all the time (for instance, it was not obvious from Google Maps that MIT is only a 25 minute walk from Copley station, as Placevision tweeted). My hosts are a wonderful couple I met through the site AirBNB (sort of like Couchsurfing but a little more formal and structured IMHO) with whom I had wonderful conversation with over breakfast this morning.

Now all I need is some nettle tea to take care of my allergies. Back to the conference!