Subscribe and never miss an entry

Upcoming Unconferences: Greenest City Camp, Transportation Camps, and Planning Technology Conference

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Technology | tagged as , , , , , , , ,

I’m literally on the path I’m on today in no small part because of unconferences. There are three coming up (well, technically three — one local, three less so) that I will be either attending or following remotely that I’m deeply excited about:

  • The City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Camp is taking this place this coming Saturday, March 5th at the SFU Work Centre for Dialogue in Downtown Vancouver. It is the City’s final Greenest City event as they wrap up consultation on the second phase of the plan before the City starts to focus on implementing work to achieve the sustainability targets that the City of Vancouver has officially adopted. I was kindly invited to be part of the awesome convenor team assisting in the finishing touches on the event; I was happy to be able to contribute some semi-precious gems from my own turns at helping to pull together unconferences, and some dear friends of mine who have accompanied me on that journey are the ones steering this particular event. I’ll be attending on Saturday, so if you are planning on being there too, come say hi!
  • Open Plans is hosting TransportationCamps in New York and San Francisco — the latter this coming Saturday and Sunday. As I tweeted when they first announced the event, TransportationCamp and TransitCamp are bruthas from the same mutha when it comes to harnessing the energy and interest in technology for improving urban mobility and accessibility. All told, this is the Bay Area’s third Transportation-themed BarCamp-style event. I’m in awe of Open Plans’ work with Streetfilms, and sad that I won’t be able to make it, but look forward to following from afar and hope attendees tweet and take notes aplenty!
  • This one’s a little further afield, but I’m planning to attend: on April 8th, just prior to the American Planning Association’s annual conference in Boston, the Planning Technology Conference (with an Ideas unconference component) will be taking place. I met some members of the organizing committee at last year’s conference. The schedule for this event was just announced and posted.

I was asked at our last convenor’s meeting if I would submit a presentation proposal to Greenest City Camp. I said that I wanted to but that I wasn’t really sure. I couldn’t really put my finger on it — you’d expect, given my history and previous activities, that I’d be jumping at the chance. What could be it? Unconference fatigue? Too long spent in the academy (ha!)?

Upon further reflection I realize that my approach to an unconference at this time and place, on a topic which I’ve been putting so much effort into, is, by necessity, fundamentally coming from a very different place than from when I first started doing unconferences. I haven’t quite reconciled it. I feel like there’s a strange sense of being responsible with the experience/”expertise” I’ve gained. No one is asking the experts to blunt our expertise in order to make room for the voices, interests and participation of others, but because I am privileged (at least for now; who knows what tomorrow will bring) to be working on a daily basis on these issues, I feel like this would be a time to listen.

Except in some ways it’s still not — I may be in the process of developing expertise, but I lack the power that requires me to be held as accountable for it as I seem to be holding myself to that I need to take the very back seat on this. I am perhaps in the position to be thinking harder about the stickiest problems as a result of that privilege, and that awareness is what I can bring to the room. Frankly, the most emotional part of the engagement I have with these topics, at times, is frustration at their seeming intractability. There’s a good chance I’ll feel a lot better after I finish this paper I’m writing on regionalism.

Chances are good, however, that I will propose something on the day of for the Greenest City conference this weekend. It’s just a little hard to resist. Seeing as I’m working on a term project looking at non-motorized urban goods movement, perhaps I’ll just hold the bike courier session and wait to see who comes, like I usually do.

Add a comment

Using the Kindle for Grad School

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Technology | tagged as , , ,

It’s been close to a month now that I’ve been living with my Kindle 3, and quite an interesting adventure, as (both deliberating and unintentionally) it has made me more aware than ever my reading practices, preferences and occasional inefficiencies.

My motivations for buying the Kindle? Mostly, grad school: 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. I’ve used those reasons as handy excuses not to do my readings in the past, and it was high time to end that habit fast. I’m a little surprised that I’m the first person I know with one.

This reasoning also eliminated the iPad, which, desirable as it is, felt a little too much like my iPhone, which is distracting as all hell. I need to have hands tied a little bit when it comes to reading; if I can play Sudoku on it, it is part of the problem, not part of the solution. I also considered the Kobo, but in the end thought for the price difference that the features of the Kindle (like free 3G Internet delivery) were worth it.

My set-up to pipe reading into my Kindle so far:

  • daily Instapaper delivery, which is fed from either the Read Later bookmarklet or via the ‘Share’ button in Google Reader.
  • Using Calibre to convert whole RSS feeds into .mobi format, then getting those e-mailed to my Kindle free e-mail address. The Kindle will download documents in this queue for free when I am connected to wifi.
  • One of my profs has a habit of sending us readings by e-mail as PDF attachments. I’m trying to get into the habit of forwarding those e-mails and all their links and attachments to my free Kindle e-mail as soon as I receive them. One thing that would be really nice is to be able to download PDFs in Mobile Safari and have them attached to e-mails I send from my iPhone.

I spent the first week transferring things through the USB cable, which is nice because the Kindle mounts as any old USB storage device — a breath of fresh air after 8 months with the iPhone! — so I can update the Kindle from any computer I happen to be using, and my habits with school/work computers means that I really might easily touch 10 generic terminals in a week, so I rely on the cloud heavily.

I have not purchased anything from the Kindle store yet — and not for lack of options or desire. The Kindle Storefront model butts up against my desire to be frugal by not buying books, so I’ve been confined mostly to downloading samples of books like Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together or Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows in order to skim the table of contents and first chapter. I have access to two university libraries and they are, sadly, both completely uninvolved in my eBook reading life.

Well, that’s not completely true. I use the following workaround in order to get very shoddy-looking eBrary books into my Kindle. That process is currently dumb and the quality on the Kindle of these files is atrocious. Unfortunately one of my required readings is only available from the library this way (and one copy in reserve for ~30 students), so it’s essentially a step up from manual.

  1. Open the book in eBrary in a Java-enabled Mac, take down the ‘real’ page numbers of my readings.
  2. Click Print in the eBrary interface.
  3. Specify the page range I am able to “Print”.
  4. Click Save PDF in the Print dialogue and save the output to my hard drive.
  5. Email the PDF to the Kindle.
  6. Struggle with the zoom and orientation to make that awkward scanned images look remotely legible.

Other than some links to eBook collections from the Vancouver Public Library, which are services like Books24x7 (which as far as I know does not have anything in .mobi or .epub format; fortunately calibre has made converting the former for .mobi mostly trivial), it does not appear the libraries will be supply content to my Kindle anytime soon. Pity, that.

Other gripes? PDFs which are formatted for printing, as many PDFs for journal articles are, are a little sticky to work with. I just discovered yesterday that sending them to the Kindle e-mail rather than simply transferring via cable runs it through a .mobi parser and some articles actually came through really nicely. But for articles formatted into flowing columns, for instance, which the Kindle service can’t reflow, the noting and annotating features of the Kindle actually get broken. Notes and annotations are stored as a plain text file in the Kindle, but for those kinds of documents, strangely, anything I am able to highlight (which is often only content from the left column) gets copied to the text file without any spaces, making it functionally useless for quoting or sharing purposes.

Gripes aside, the Kindle has pretty much made the annoying paper parts of printed PDFs go away, and sloshing reading material in and out of it has been generally painless. On a more media ecology level, this is the first piece of technology I’ve ever had that feel like it won’t age, because it’s already old. The touch screens of the iPhone and iPad, using McLuhan’s terms, feel fundamentally like deeply engaging, cool media; whereas the Kindle, with its molasses slow visible e-ink refresh and 16 shades of grey, feels hot with respect for the power of the written word over the playful instantaneity of the touch screens.

I’ve hollowed out a book to act as a camo-case for the Kindle. The one annoying part is that the power button become inaccessible and I have to turn the book upside down just to get the damn thing out. This will probably be fixed with a ribbon to pull the Kindle out of its groove. It’s nice to pretend I’m not doing anything too high-tech, because the e-ink in particular can look really starting the first time you see it; and really, I just want to read.

Comments (2)

Visual Analytics: Thoughts at Week 3 and Links

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Technology

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 not a debate about whether we’ll “submit to the logic of the machine”, but that we’ll nuance our understanding of what machines do best and what we as humans do best, and find ways to support effective dialogue between what people do best and what machines do best. Values come up as a topic a lot, because those lie at the heart of policy decisions.

It takes all my might sometimes not to laugh outloud in class, because much of the work in the visual analytics field originates in intelligence analysis and law enforcement, and I think the layman’s understanding of what this looks like probably comes from shows like CSI, Criminal Minds or Lie To Me. (Fun fact: the work of Paul Ekman, the inspiration for the lead character in Lie to Me played by Tim Roth, is excerpted heavily in my textbook. Small world.) The vision put forth through those dramatized procedural formats, stocked with genius-level characters constantly pulling associations out of thin air, speaks to the dream that this stuff isn’t just for playing Bejeweled at the drop of a hat, or immersing us in trivialities — that it can, in fact, empower us to tackle issues in new ways that we were never previously able to.

But I’m admittedly in this class for much more mundane, much less glamourous reasons (unless that TV procedural about urban planners ever pans out). As I stated in my presentation at Open Gov West BC, I’m really interested in how Big Data — the kind being collected by the kinds of systems we are putting into place under the auspices of smarter or more sustainable cities — can help us to understand our collective interdependency. That’s my goal for the class: to understand what helps or hurts conveying that message, as well as how to nuance our understanding of when that holds true, and when it does not.

Since we’re fairly early on in my class so far, I’m just starting to get my feet wet a bit with the tools, and also seeking plenty of inspiration. So far, I’m pretty bowled over by VizCandy. Kelly shares her perspective being educated in sociology and demography, picks great topics and shares her process of making visualizations in Tableau Public. A trip through her blog’s archives is on my calendar…

I’ve also started to play around with Compendium.  I wonder what it would look like, for instance, to visually represent insights around things like the challenges for municipalities in participating in regional planning, or funding transportation.

There’s also some really interesting threads in my class around the concept of “pair analytics” — similar to pair programming, except instead of having two programmers, you have one domain expert and one person adept in using visual analytics tool, working together to understand what the value of representation is. I find I’m halfway in between both of these roles — still learning about the domain, and interested in, but not yet proficient in, the tools.

Add a comment

Second Year: Thoughts on Spring 2011

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Scholarship, Technology | tagged as , , , , ,

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 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.

Add a comment

Lessons: Planning and the Spiral Nature of Experience

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Ideas | tagged as , ,

One of the most profound teachings I had a chance to be exposed to this semester (there was a lot of them) was the idea of experience as a spiral. The things that we think we’ve put behind us, both the joy and the happiness, we will encounter again, except they’ll present themselves to us wearing a different mask, and we ourselves will inevitably be altered from the last time. However we envision it — a demon on a road, an obstacle to overcome, a situation or a set of circumstances — there are triggers, tools, instincts, and that funny, emergent way in which details become stories that follow familiar arcs and turns; the various facets of myself peek out of the hidden corners of who I fancied myself to be.

We’re at the first day of 2011. I’m coming down the homestretch of this journey I started a year and a half ago with this master’s degree. I’ve been here before, and I will be here again. What would I like to remember for next time?

I often forget to work to my strengths rather than my weaknesses. It’s too tempting. I’ve heard it said that this could be conceived of as a form of perfectionism; I like to think of it above all else as a preference for beginner’s mind. This bumps up in interesting way with the concept of artistry:

The practice of inhabiting the edge in community engagement asks artistry to step forward and push us into new territory. Artistry is about many different things. It is about ingeniousness and it’s about prowess, confidence, and craftsmanship. Artistry is a superior skill that you can learn by practice and observation. In community engagement, it could be said that operating at the level of artistry means making your projects ‘sing’. [...] The artfulness or practice of inhabiting the edge involves deep listening, nesting creative apporaches within a wider engagement process and ensuring that dreams are translated into appropriate action. (Wendy Sarkissian, Diana Hurford and Christine Wenman, Creative Community Planning, 2010).

Artistry also resonates with me as the highest form of what I cannot help but do or be as a consequence of my particular past and personality — recognizing and owning my gifts and their implications, the other deep learning of this semester. The work — described above as community engagement, but spanning so many other things as it applies to my particular corner — is deeply satisfying to me; yet, as busy people often are, I am consistently and constantly pulled in many other directions. Some of these extend and enrich; others confuse and act as diversions. Sometimes it feels like I don’t quite yet have the strength to pursue the path of this particular kind of work the way that others have, or I’m simply not interested in wading in ear-deep in one particular thing and feel an urge to be bouncing back and forth consistently between some poles.

Despite this, I’m bringing what I have learned into the world I do know: engagement on and through technology, taking what we say and who we are online into who we are and what we do on the level of the everyday. Learning to harness the aggregate energy of what we already collectively do — our footprints through the data-snow — into healthier, more inclusive, more sustainable communities.

Make safe space for the ‘no’. This was a learning that came back to me, and it applies to both group situations and my own inner crowd of characters. The no doesn’t stop things from going forward; but it holds wisdom for more considerate and robust action. My ability to live as if this is true will determine the shape of my practice.

Sarkissian also points us to Meg Holden, who draws on William James’ examination of the philosophy of pragmatism for the balance and fusion of being simultaneously tough-minded and tender-minded:

To be tough minded, Meg summarizes, is to believe and trust in ‘facts’ and to learn through continuous testing and experimentation, whereas to be tender minded is to act on beliefs and intuition, be spontaneous, hopeful and ‘idealistic’. In sustainability, Meg argues the work of pragmatism is to bridge these ways of being through processes that develop new relationships of trust, respect and regular patterns of action, rather than specific one-time products or ‘outcomes’. (Sarkissian, Hurford and Wenman, page 6)

I’m happy to report that the project I will be pursuing for my master’s pushes me to maximize both these areas, as well as to continue strengthening the act of moving effectively between the two without losing the effectiveness of either. My instinct, faced with uncertainty, is to do more research; it helps but I can take it too far and never come back to the original challenge or need, or drag my feet on making the actual decision. This is where I find myself now in honing in on the actual question and tasks of the thesis. I remain hopeful as I sketch out what I am learning about the different interests in play, and the limits of what I can know in order to start doing.

While every part of my degree has been enlightening, this part — much of which comes from the class subtitled “Educating the Heart” — are the ones that make me most confident that I can find ways to make what I do useful and valuable to people. Looking forward to buckling down and doing the hard and delightful work of making that true.

Add a comment

StratML: sketching a start for Official Community Plans in XML

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts | tagged as , , ,

This post is a messy summary of where my thinking is at for using StratML for official community plans.

Firstly, the StratML standard is largely still being defined (their progress can be messily tracked at XML.gov). Part 1 of the standard is available as a schema and covers 7 core elements of strategic plans, and Part 2 is for performance plans. The strategic plan is organization centric. The performance plan gets into some details relating to performance indicators, value chains, and the role of stakeholders.

In the most rudimentary ways, this has some interesting applications for OCPs:

  • The 7 elements of Part 1, as I mentioned, are organizational-centric (they comprise of Organization, Mission, Vision, Value, Goal, Objective, and Stakeholder). Because of the number of groups which touch the policies affected by he organizational field feels a little funny, but everything else — the mission, vision, value, goal, objectives and stakeholders — feel like they would work pretty well.
  • Stakeholders can be either Performers or Beneficiaries, which jives with the traditional planning understanding of stakeholders.
  • Performance Indicators, which can be either quantitative or qualitative, have a couple of of Vacouverapplicable children: MeasurementDimension, UnitofMeasurement, TargetResult, ActualResult.

I decided to read over the Mount Pleasant Community Vision, recently approved by City of Vancouver, to see how it would apply to the way that document is structured. This is where it started to get interesting. The Vision document goes through Key Questions, then has some Overarching Principles. Here’s an example, using text from the vision, of how this might work:

Vision: Housing & Population Mix

  • Goal: Diversity in housing, land uses, businesses and services
  • Objective: Ensure livability for the existing types and sizes of families and households by encouraging the development of housing that addresses a wide range of affordable housing needs–including rental, co-ops, supported housing, and artist live-work housing–while seeking to provide the services and facilities that those families and households need.
  • Objective: Serve a highly diverse population mix with a mix of unit sizes and housing types, a mix of land uses across the neighbourhood and a mix of uses within many individual buildings, a mix of architectural styles, a mix of tenure arrangements (fee-simple, strata, co-op, co-housing, rental, subsidized housing, possibly land trust), and a mix of businesses and community services.

There is some question about where values come in; could “Diversity in housing…” be a value? Having gone through the values-based decision-making methodology, I am more likely to associate values with Stakeholders.

This as far as I’ve gone for now, and there’s a lot more nuance that would be required in thinking out how stakeholders would be described and for what reasons they would be included or connected with certain values and goals. It’d be interesting to think about the Performance Plans and Performance Reports standards as they would apply to urban planning rather than the organizational workflow.

Add a comment

Bringing Historic Vancouver Maps into the Present and Future

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts, Ideas | tagged as , , , , ,

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. At this juncture there are so many different kinds of maps from different time periods, that it’s a little hard to figure out what people would want to make with them.

The potential of what’s contained in these maps for research and analysis is tremendous, however. I’m thinking, for instance, of a friend’s final project which looked at historic retail areas in Vancouver and business turnover. She went through old phone books in order to determine the status and type of businesses. It’s also instructive for learning what was important to Vancouver staff throughout time.

The limitations: not all maps are created equal; maps that under City of Vancouver copyright and not licensed from someone else would be usable. The maps in question can be found through the Archives’ City Government Records search. Unfortunately there’s no way of seeing how much interest in particular maps through the existing system.

I think there’s a lot of relevance in reflecting on the history of planning in Vancouver, and using modern frameworks to frame and explore historic information. But I think there’s some wisdom to Sue’s approach — this is not the lowest hanging fruit of data, so the justification for putting the effort into it needs to be a little stronger or the cost and effort to make the data useful needs to be lower.

Add a comment

Ideas for International Open Data Hackathon in Vancouver

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in City, Soup to Nuts, Ideas, Technology

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 tool for crowdsourced, distributed incident or defect reporting that may have some hooks or relationship with Open311.

My participation in hackathons is always a little curious because I mostly just give my ideas away and occasionally try to exercise what little I ever knew about UML diagrams. That said, here are two ideas I’m interested in getting some opinions on:

  1. Citizen DAN: This is exciting to me — it’s applying an Open Semantic Framework to datasets at the local government level and focused on metrics around community well-being. Right now it’s a demo with Iowan US census data, but it’d be interesting to use this to explore and ask questions about the relationships between the datasets in the Vancouver Data Catalogue and to put this alongside the data we know exists but isn’t open, such as data used by the Fraser Basin Council in their sustainability indicators report card, or the Vancouver Foundation’s Vital Signs report. I’m not up enough on the direction of semantic web to assess how this is technically, but if anyone’s interested in playing around with semantic web, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. From what I gather, the community is just starting to get some legs under it. I’m especially curious about what it does with stories and text analysis, as I know there is someone here at UBC, twitter user Vancouverdata, who does some work on text mining. This blog post announcing the project launch back in August sums it up fairly well. Additional points: it’s based on Drupal!
  2. Vancouver Business License Data: Tylor Sherman and I talked a bit at BarCamp Vancouver about analysing the City of Vancouver’s Business License Data. While I have some ideas for potential analysis, I also haven’t really delved into the data to see what’s in it. But for the uber-geeky reading, I’d suggest the Metro Core Jobs report.
  3. Official Community Plans in XML: This is the pie-in-the-sky idea that I’m going to throw out there just because I think it’d be cool if it existed: currently, planning documents tend to take really diverse forms. I’ve been trying my absolute darnedest to wrap my head around StratML, a standardized XML vocabulary and schema in development that’s intended to describe common elements of performance plans and reports. I think there could be really interesting applications for Official Community Plans, and to established relationships between stated objectives in plans, and the kinds of changes we see in our communities. The dream is to be able to programmatically gauge whether a planning authority (i.e. a municipality or regional district) has in fact walked the talk it set out in a plan, even if problems of definition run amok. The main obstacle I see is, for how cool StratML sounds in theory, it has the most irritating community outreach (more like community repellant) I have ever seen. The good news is that the standard is being baked into InfoPath, which is distributed with Microsoft Office 2010. I’d be interested to see what parts of StratML could be adapted to OCPs, perhaps to capture some of the geographic aspects.

So — two extremely urban planning geeky topics, one data geeky. I’m going to add them to the ODHD wiki and see what happens.

To also join up the other geeky parts of my life (namely being a volunteer with the Vancouver Public Space Network),  I’m glad to see a manager from the Vancouver Parks Board will be attending the Hackathon, as the Parks Board has just wrapped up a survey assessing what datasets the public wants to see them release. Kudos!

Unfortunately I will probably not be able to make the Hackathon being hosted by Vancouver Hackspace afterwards (at least so I heard — no sites online corroborating this). Here’s to some hacking good times.

Comments (2)

Reflecting on “What Urban Planning Taught Me About Open Data” – Open Gov West Presentation

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Featured, Scholarship
What Urban Planning Taught Me About Open Data

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

Comments (1)

Lightning Talk at Open Gov West BC — Open government and Urban Planning

by Karen Quinn Fung | posted in Ideas | tagged as ,

I received the happy news that I will be doing a lightning talk about Open Government BC on November 10th. I’m happy to put what I’ve been learning and thinking about open government in front of people whose work, activities and perspectives I am deeply indebted to, and I hope I’m able to meet some people who resonate with what I’m interested in! I’ve also been volunteering where I can with the conference-organizing effort, so I am looking forward to being in Victoria.

I’m always fascinated by the experience of walking between conversations — who I am and what I tell you I think inevitably varies whether I am volunteering, talking to those working in Communication or learning from those with a planning perspective. Some words hold overlapping meanings — my Urban Governance class succeeded in blowing my mind with Iris Young’s The Ideal of Community even though I’ve been reading about it in different ways all over the place — and there’s much that looks similar but actually has very different foundations. The relevance of the idea of open government and open data very much have to do with what one’s experiences and preferences for “democracy” are. I’m interested to see conversations about open government move in this direction, and playing around with it through talking to people closer to the action.

I’m stoked to meet the challenge of talking about planning, development and cities, and open government! :)

Add a comment