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.

I’m particularly excited because this year I have a different role than previously. Not only am I a student, but I’m also a volunteer convener for the Open Gov West conference in Portland, which means I’ve had a chance to see what kinds of topics people are wanting to talk about and the stories they want to share on their open government initiatives, as well as how these interests intersect and overlap with the goals of urban planning.

As I tweeted, I will be promoting OGW’s discount rate of 10% off regular price of registration for APA2011 attendees. As a very reasonably priced, non-profit conference open to all sectors interested in how government gets things done, I highly recommend anybody with interest in the use of technology for collaboration between governments and citizens to come to the conference. More information on Open Gov West is at the conference website.

Incidentally, I must also say a word of thanks to the editors of Planning Technology Today, the APA Technology Division’s newsletter, for including a brief article I submitted about the connection of open data and planning. It picks up a lot of the major points from my presentation at Open Gov West BC while expanding upon it with a few additional examples.

Finally, I am currently searching for a summer internship to not only learn more about public engagement and transportation planning, but how groups and governments see these things meshing with online conversations, open data and open government generally.

If your work touches any (or all!) of these topics, and you are attending APA 2011 I would love to catch a moment to hear more about what you do and where you want to go in with technology in your work!

People can and do use social commitments as a form of accountability. I am more likely to do work in an expeditious manner if I know I will be meeting someone, in person, who is counting on mme having done my work. It’s a bit of a cheat, perhaps, but most people won’t question it if the work gets done.

But there are also occasions where the excuse of the meeting has failed in motivating someone to do the work. I’ve been here and guilty of this. But when time is stretched across so many projects and meetings and schedules are so tight packed, it is vital to understand that if the work hasn’t been done, then meeting is not working. Meeting is only working if you are coordinating work that you are doing outside the meeting.

Sometimes I lose sight of this and sometimes I think others I work with have lost sight of this. In either case, it’s worth underscoring, remember, and keeping close to heart, and I think it explains not only the missteps of others but also my own.

• PLAN 548: Transportation Planning Analysis with Jinhua Zhao (class cross-listed with Civil Engineering)
• PLAN 596: Seminar on Ecological Economics with Bill Rees
• PLAN 550E: Building North America’s Most Sustainable City with Patrick Condon and Sam Sullivan (former Mayor of Vancouver; now of the Global Civic Policy Society)
• IAT 885: Visually-Enabled Reasoning with Brian Fisher at School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU Surrey

I’m expecting to be stretched by this courseload in some extremely intriguing and important ways.

• Analysis: the prof of IAT 885 has promised to make us “reflective analysts,” and, my transportation class has the word “analysis” in the title, so if my analysis skills are sketchy, they are likely to be much improved by the time I hit April 9th. I’m treating this as the biggest piece, because my degree so far has probably focused on people and ideas more than it has been about information in a hands-on manner (even as a lot of things have involved information). This class is so far really wonderful because I’m starting to realize that my big challenge as a researcher is making the jump from observations to understanding how to create tests to analyze, and doing so in a systematic and rigorous fashion. I’m really stoked to be diving more into decision theory, cognitive science and graphical representation.
• Fleshing out ideas: my master’s project is going to be touching on service design, co-design of information experiences, and public space policies. I’ve found myself thinking about Adam Greenfield’s Everyware a lot these days, as I quote his assertion that many of the people building the pieces of “everyware”¹ aren’t aware that that’s what they’re building, even as they’re making what pretty much amount to architectural decisions about information. I’m struggling to eke out a research proposal and to fit the pieces together with what I actually can and want to do. That said, I’m fortunate that the flow of class assignments and the work mean that I’m being forced to understand and face up the challenge constantly; and for me, that’s a pretty big and helpful thing.
• Writing To Live: My two analysis classes require me to essentially keep journals — one formal, with reference to our course readings, and one more informal, on the processes we are going through as we created analyses. In addition to that, the usual boat of research and term papers. I am determined to make this writing go a lot easier and to be of higher quality than it has been, as well as to be a lot more active in that autodidactic process. Part of this means overcoming the images I have about what this blog is supposed to be. While I want it to be of value to the people reading it, I think I want to re-frame that so that the first person it should serve is me, and understanding the nature of that commitment to quality output to myself is a big piece of the work. This may mean more playing around with defining what this site and the Tumblr are really for.

This has turned out to be the class where I expand on how the perspective of planners looks like in collaboration with others: architects and landscape architects; civil engineers; researchers and visual designers, economists…it’s stretching me quite a bit.

I’m hoping also over the course of this semester to be working up to a much more solidified vision of what kind of value I can offer in a work situation. From there, I will continue to find out who’s working on the neat things that I want to be onboard with, and what are their biggest challenges?  Let’s call this my 5.5 “class” (where the fifth class is already the thesis)…

[1] his term for ubiquitous or pervasive computer, or the sensors involved in Smarter Cities, or whatever the use of informatics in your corner of the world calls it this week.

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’m looking forward to learning more about URBZ, who shared some of their approach, interests and projects with us over Skype during a monsoon in Mumbai (!). That was an excellent Skype experience: the wifi was fast, the sound was hooked into the auditorium sound system, and the microphone was good from their end. Skype-in conference presentations need to take a note from the way International House and the JM crew set it up. Despite the tumultuous detail juggling, it pretty much went off without a hitch. They even did very effective screensharing!

The organizer’s brief speech about the teaching of the urban and the injection of community into the teaching model was interesting. I see a lot of this happening in our program but, sadly, not in the way I am actually interested in. That’s been unfortunate. But I also know that part of the reason I feel that way is that I am highly embedded into the community I’m interested in — those interested in open data advocacy. I’m always going to be disappointed that I can’t hang out with them for credit.

I’ve handed over my poster on Twitter in Public Transit to the conference organizers, and I’ll be presenting tomorrow at lunch. It looks like the posters will be hung in a hallway, so I’m not certain how much space there will be to converse, but I’m excited to be talking about how I’ve seen Twitter used with people who haven’t had a chance to dabble with it yet. Live iPod touch demos for the win (wifi willing!)

The conversations I’ve had so far have been interesting. I think about politics and political participation a lot, but perhaps not to in the same kind of way as those either those who are reading and writing theory on an ongoing basis, or those working in direct action organizations like Causa Husta. I feel like part of my desire is to help suss out a new politics of the centre, that can speak to opinions across the spectrum without excluding or alienating — that idea of the low-barrier participation wedge (that gets increasingly participatory) writ political. In some situations (but not all), working and being together is more important than being right or winning. So, leaves the question, where do we need to be together?

Today I’ll be at a workshop in Oakland on regional transportation. I’m going to veer off my blogging tack of late, which has been to attempt to inject a bit of craft into my blog posts, and for the next couple days, I’m going to write things down and let them be posted, rambling and unvarnished.

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’ll kick it off with this excellent quote I used in my recent presentation for my final paper on Transdisciplinary Action Research for Planning Healthy Schools. (Incidentally, that presentation was done remotely so it is available as a 15 minute video on Vimeo.) Jason Corburn is discussing re-connecting the fields of public health and urban planning. He writes,

While reconnecting planning and public health will require increased attention to the health effects of plans in geographic places, it will also demand that the field recognize its role in the politics of “place-making.” Planning must increasingly be understood as a profession that manages conflicts over political power and values that arise when, for instance, state or private- sector objectives clash with those of local communities. If planning is to be reconnected with public health, planning practice must be conceptualized as a set of outcomes (e.g., housing, transportation systems, urban designs) and processes that can (1) involve the use or abuse of power, (2) respond to or resist market forces, (3) work to empower certain groups and disempower others, and (4) promote multiparty consensual decisionmaking discourses or simply rationalize decisions already made.

In other words, planning practice involves choices regarding which information is deemed relevant, what decisionmaking processes will be used, and when, or if, various publics will be involved in making the plan. Reconnecting the fields will require increased attention to the politics of planning practice (i.e., in terms of shaping public agendas and attention), available evidence and norms of inquiry, inclusive or exclusive deliberations, and responses (or lack thereof) to bias, discrimination, inequality, and recalcitrance.¹

I really like that. It doesn’t solve, but it does speak to, what I’m seeing is the role of planners in outcomes and processes — which is that we aren’t typically at the lowest level of outcomes, and we aren’t wielding the power to start things along, but we shepherd a process of working the issues on both sides. It also means we are ever-changing.

¹ Corburn, J. (2004). Confronting the Challenges in Reconnecting Urban Planning and Public Health. Am J Public Health, 94(4), 541-546. doi:10.2105/AJPH.94.4.541

Noise 2 Signal by Rob Cottingham.

His witty and observant comic is syndicated on ReadWriteWeb, a techhnology-focused blog. The comic touches on a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own life that I’ve had a chance to do a little bit of scholarly work on; namely, how well mobile technologies go with transit. I first approached the question: does this mean that those who have access to transit have more time to spend using mobiles for social networking, obtaining information or coordinating socially? Also, does living in areas with good transit mean more possibilities to be more flexible and fluid with allocating time for activities of daily life? I know for myself that driving causes me more stress and takes away at least a good 30 minutes that I spend alternating between reading, writing, and decompressing. And even though the stress associated with transit certainly isn’t zero, I know for my personality and circumstance that I get an awful lot of flexibility from being lucky enough to be served well by transit.

I wrote a paper on this topic earlier this year, drawing in a thread on physical activity as well. My realm of choice expands exponentially when I put my bike on the bus — something I’m also very lucky to be able to do because the buses here in Vancouver all have bike racks (although I also live on a route serving the university which means occasionally the bike racks are too full to take me! A happy problem but a problem nonetheless). That means I take the bus to school to avoid that hill, and ride home in the evenings when my time isn’t so crunched by meetings — and get a good hour of decent cardio in.

It’s expanding these choices — to walk and take the bus or train when it suits me, to bike when the weather’s right, and borrow a car from the local car-share if I’m carrying stuff — that strikes me as the “good stuff” of cities. But it’s also being able to coordinate in real-time with the people in my life, to know what’s up with them and manipulate my spatial circumstances based on what I know about how they’re doing, that’s also rocking my world. I’m also paying handsomely for it — and I’m not talking about the 3G data plan! Rather, it’s that access to good transit and decent mixed land use places where one can walk to meet their daily needs and get to work in a reasonable amount of time, often come with a hefty price tag. In my case, I trade-off the fact that I don’t own a car with higher rent.

Anyway, I find it interesting that Apple’s also clued into this and has focused their latest iPhone commercial on the use of public transit applications for navigating cities and commuting. In more academic terms, I’m interested to see how social media, location services and online social networking might accrue different benefits to people based on what they prefer, transportation mode-wise, as well as how all these taken together might actually affect travel behaviour.

My paper’s perhaps a tad more articulate; go take a look at A Behaviour Settings Approach to Impacts of ICTs, Travel Behaviour and Built Environment on Physical Activity.