I’m nearing the end of my layover in Chicago in the last leg of my journey to Boston. It’s been a strenuous 24 hours or so, crossing timezones and working on assignments, but I know this will all be worth it as, in but a few hours, I will be attending PlanningTech@DUSP, and in the [...]
Three unconferences coming up: Transportation Camps in New York and San Francisco, Greenest City Camp in Vancouver, and in April, Planning Technology Conference in Boston.
I looked at the stack of PDFs for readings for my Transportation Analysis class and my schedule travelling between 3 campuses 5 days a week, and cringed, hard. I already hate the idea of printing mountains of readings off, and also don’t read well off backlit screens. So I bought a Kindle, and, as I detail in the rest of this post, I’ve found reading off it, and working to get stuff on it, to be an absolute joy.
I’m a few weeks into my class on Visually Enabled Reasoning, and it’s a deeply interesting class so far. We are starting with some lectures and readings on human cognition, reasoning, decision-making and mental modelling. Taken with the topics we covered in my Decision Insights for Public Policy, I’m really inspired by the idea that [...]
It’s the end of the third week of the semester. I can safely say that my course schedule has shaped up to be an intensive and challenging one: PLAN 548: Transportation Planning Analysis with Jinhua Zhao (class cross-listed with Civil Engineering) PLAN 596: Seminar on Ecological Economics with Bill Rees PLAN 550E: Building North America’s [...]
This coming Saturday is International Open Data Hackathon day. In Vancouver, it’s happening at W2 Storyeum in Gastown (details via the ODHD wiki). There was a (very!) short session led by Aaron Gladders at BarCamp Vancouver on what we might focus our efforts on during the Open Data Hackathon, and we settled working on a [...]
I volunteered to lead a session on Non-Profits and Open Civic Data at yesterday’s NetSquaredCamp, and we talked and thought 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.
Via IBM’s Smarter Cities Tumblr, I stumbled across this summary from the Sustainable Cities Collective of an interesting event that happened recently — a panel discussion taking place at the Apple Store on Regent Street in London about data in cities. The panelists were Usman Haque, Susannah Hagan, Rachel Armstrong, and Juliet Davis — who [...]
This is an extremely long post mashing together Beth Simone Noveck’s chapter on collaborative democracy with Judith Innes and David Booher’s recent book on collaborative rationality in planning called “Planning with Complexity,” mixed liberally with my own thoughts on community management in open source software. A lot of hand-waving, block quotes, and thinking out-loud.
At this year’s Northern Voice, I was grateful to have been given the chance to moderate a panel, titled, “From Tweets to Plans: Online Conversations for Urban Planning.” I’d gotten the idea to do it from being invited to the SCARP Symposium by PlanningPool, where I found myself talking about blogging to urban planners, and [...]
