Last Thursday, friends and local web app artisans Tylor Sherman and Todd Sieling (principals of Denim and Steel) launched This is Our Stop, a web application they have spent the last few months developing and testing. It is a refinement of my original concept of “a Facebook wall for every bus stop” I proposed back [...]
Inspired by my friend Raul Pacheco-Vega’s recent use of Twitter to encourage scholars to talk about their research, I’d like to get planning researchers and practitioners talking a little bit about what they get from using Twitter. There’s always been a lot of misperceptions — that Twitter is only for reading headlines, sharing what you [...]
Source: ekosystem.org 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 [...]
Summary (aka tl;dr) World Usability Day and World Town Planning Day are two events celebrated very close together, in the first week of November. I propose having a joint project or event to lay the groundwork for conversation between urban planners and user experience practitioners, and the insights each can bring for navigating the urban [...]
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 [...]
Richard Layman linked to a recent post to a PriceWaterhouseCooper report on how Olympic or other mega-event legacy infrastructure can accelerate development by up to 30 years. He comments on how good planning is a big part of leveraging these opportunities into longer-term wins for the communities: Much of the time, events or projects for [...]
We watched. 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 [...]
Some late reflections on The Crowdsourced City, which describes two things: first, it was an event at SFU Vancouver on May 10th; I then repurposed it as the departure point for an unconference I proposed and led at Open Gov West 2011 in Portland on May 14th. CrowdSourced City: the SFU City Presentation This event [...]
I’ve been back in Vancouver for just about 48 hours now — enough time to get a little distance without being too far away from the conversations I had at this year’s American Planning Association conference. While I often look back and think that the event is really intense and overwhelming — especially since it [...]
It’s Saturday at the APA National Conference. I would be attending an interesting-looking session on walkability and GIS, but by the time I arrived to the session at its designated start time, the crowd watching the session was spilling out the doorway and I decided I didn’t want to add to the fire evacuation risk, [...]
