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 [...]
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’m writing this blog post from Vancouver Open Data Hackathon. These are some takeaways from a conversation with Sue Bigelow from the Vancouver Archives. Sue has been interested in the potential applications of Map Rectifier on scans of maps of Vancouver created by the City of Vancouver over the years as part of their work. [...]
“Adopt-a-Stop” is our idea for a web and mobile-enabled application for community members to find and share information about the five-block radius around each bus stop. As the name alludes, the service will encourage and empower individual community members to garden and curate and take ownership of an individual Facebook-style page for each stop.
Live on The Drive? Hung out there? Ever walk its streets and think, “This place is perfect! NEVER CHANGE!” Or, conversely, “Gawds, this place is awful, won’t someone please do something about it?” (Doubtful, but just covering the bases…) This range of reactions is exactly what me and my class have been going through, every [...]
Last Friday, due to a great stroke of fortune, I got to visit the Vancouver 311 call centre and hear a presentation from two of that project’s key figures: the person who championed the project within City Hall, Barbara Pearce, and the Operations Manager, Darcy Wilson. I didn’t know too much about the 311 project [...]
In May, I spoke to Vancouver City Council in support of the motion on open data. One of my beliefs that I stated at that presentation, and which I still believe, is that open data creates the possibility of citizens being able to have conversations based on fact. With the challenges of peak oil and [...]
A summary of new developments at the Home Grow-In Grocer, including owner Deb’s philanthropic efforts, new produce and community contributions.
Since the start of the Burrard Bike Lane Reallocation Trial, the temperature of the relationship between cyclists and drivers has occasionally flared up, and I’ve unwittingly and unintentionally exposed myself to more negativity about my choice to be a cyclist and my occasional bending of the law than, really, is mentally healthy. After this blog [...]
I’m dreaming of something akin to a Civic Mythbusters website. Everyone’s got an urban legend or generalization that’s been passed around so often, it might as well be fact for the way people talk about it. But when the data to actually really truly verify the validity of a claim is made available and the analysis possible, well, why not do it?
