The Open Planning Project

Thanks to everyone who came to the Hacking the City event last night at Personal Democracy Forum. The NYFI blog at the NY Observer has a nice write-up:

The conversation was led by members of The Open Planning Project, DIYcity founder John Geraci, and Streetsblog editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek, who began by opening up the floor to thoughts on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement earlier in the day of a new contest for Web developers to design online and mobile applications out of city data, which will soon be made available in a programming-friendly format ("opened up").

The contest, called Big Apps, takes a cue from Washington D.C.’s Apps For Democracy challenge, Mr. Naparstek noted. But, he asked, “What can we do” with city data here in New York City?

The reporter later noted that, as a part of Big Apps, the city will be asking citizens what data it wants to see. Ideas?

The Economist, in its June 6th 2009 issue article “Mapping a better world,” discusses the role maps play in effecting social change.  They seem to miss, however, how open source tools directly influence this development.  Open source mapping is not about budgeting for the non-profit with limited resources.   Rather, it provides solutions that work for all kinds of mapmakers.

The article initially captures the democratizing power of mapping:

For most people [maps are] a handy tool to find a nearby pizzeria or get directions to a meeting. But mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice…[N]on-profit groups and individuals around the world are finding that maps can help them make their case far more intuitively and effectively than speeches, policy papers of press releases.

On the subject of the mapping software landscape, however, the article is less enlightened.  After mentioning ESRI as “the market leader in mapping software,” the author adds, almost as an afterthought, “the rise of open-source projects such as MapServer, PostGIS, and GRASS GIS have made sophisticated mapping available to non-profit groups with limited resources.”

And here the article has fallen into the common assessment that open source software is merely a cheaper version of its proprietary brethren.  Organizations, regardless of size, or for-profit status, want geospatial tools that meet their needs.  To this end, cost is often a factor, but not always the most overriding one.  With access to code, open source mapmakers can build the solution that works best for them, rather than being forced to work around a given product.

Such openness has fundamentally changed the landscape of web mapping, even helping make projects featured in The Economist article possible.  The profiled Ushahidi, makers of crowd-sourcing social activism software, promises on their website to “make [our] mapping tool available globally for free.”

In this way, a diverse range of organizational models find open software well matched for their mission of social justice.  From the Obama Administration’s Delivery on Change initiative, an interactive account of citizen action for change, to SourceMap, a platform for visualizing product supply chains, to the MarineMap Decision Support Tool, a public forum for designating the use of marine environments, organizations are choosing open source tools not because of limited resources but because “open” means the best tool for the job.

At OpenGeo, we are committed to making open source mapping a seamless experience.  With such access and ease, any organization can take their vision of a better world and map it into reality.

Join us at Personal Democracy Forum on Monday, June 29, for Hacking The City:

Grab a cocktail and join Streetsblog.org editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek, members of The Open Planning Project, and John Geraci, the founder of DIYcity.org, for a freewheeling discussion of how online journalism, advocacy and community-building tools are being used to hack the urban political machine, rewrite city government's operating system and transform city dwellers' relationship to their local politics in New York City and across America. Streetsblog and TOPP are on the front lines of the fight to transform New York into a more livable and sustainable city and have achieved some remarkable successes in moving new policy ideas from the Internet to asphalt in New York and many other cities. DIYcity is a network of developers and urban hackers spanning dozens of cities worldwide, applying and sharing the same ideas across varying environments. If you are interested in applying ideas and techniques of Personal Democracy to urban government, come by and join the conversation.

The fun is all happening at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Hacking the City starts at the end of the first day, immediately after the formal sessions. It is open to all conference attendees.

Who knew there are over 3000 block parties in New York City each summer?  Well, we’ve just launched BlockPartyNYC.org to be the go-to site for everything block party.  The site both contains information to assist you in throwing a block party, and allows you to promote your block party on our interactive map.  You can also sign up for weekly notifications of block parties in your neighborhood.

The tricky part now is to draw enough interest to get the bulk of the 3000 block parties registered on the site without which our weekly notifications would be less useful.  Our partner organization on this project, Transportation Alternatives, is in contact with the Upper West Side Community Board to encourage them to register each block party they approve.  We hope to also work out similar partnerships with other Community Boards.  As a return service, we have developed a widget for inclusion on Community Board sites that lists their upcoming parties.

Behind the scenes is a PostGIS database we use for its spatial queries.  The site is built in pylons and Wordpress, and the mapping is done using OpenLayers.  The site was built to facilitate re-skinning for other purposes.  If you are interested in using or developing with the open source software we wrote, the Block Party project page has the details.

So check it out!  Find out when parties are coming up in your neighborhood.  If you know anyone throwing a party, get them to register it on the site, and, don’t be shy, go and throw a party yourself!

The developers at OpenGeo have been working with others toward an initial release of the GeoExt toolkit.  GeoExt brings together the spatial capabilities of OpenLayers with the user interface power of ExtJS.  To demonstrate the types of applications that can be built with GeoExt, we’re putting out a preview release of GeoExplorer.

The goal of GeoExplorer is to make it easy for anyone to assemble a browser based mapping application with functionality traditionally found in the desktop GIS world.  The GeoExplorer preview release includes basic layer browsing capabilities and can be placed in front of any compliant WMS.  Give the preview release a try or download it and set it up in front of your own server.

After the initial release of GeoExt, we’ll be rolling out a more feature filled version of GeoExplorer.  Upcoming releases will include a wizard for configuring a GeoExplorer application with your own layers and publishing options for embedding the app in any web page.

We just put up a new case study about how Western Australia's is leveraging open source software and collaborative mapping. As the government authority responsible for land and property information, Landgate manages data that underpins hundreds of civil services. Landgate had TOPP's OpenGeo division build a prototype for collaborative mapping, and the result has the potential to change the way agencies handle and share their geospatial data.

You can read more here.

On Friday, I took my first trip up to Albany for the first (fingers crossed) CapitolCamp, an unconference put together by the NY State Senate CIO and the NY State CIO.

A real range of people and experiences were represented: private citizens who had a specific need, public servants who can see the process challenges of moving to bottom-up systems, librarians who are the faithful stewards of Senate data, folks hoping to make sense of all the silly webapp names being thrown their way, the geeks who spend all day on those apps.

This diversity was a challenge, but that's why we all came together in the first place. This is a big responsibility of people who work and play on the Web: to work with public servants to understand the current process challenges and ways to address them.

TOPP got kudos at a few points, both for the community tools at Livable Streets and for converting the MTA Budget data into an open, mashable form.

My takeaways:

Which Open Data?

It was great to hear Ben Yee say 'hey we have a ton of data and we want to make it all open and accessible, so tell me what you want to see first.' After a few minutes, the list included: budgets, geospatial data, member items, committees, government-funded data links. Here's what they have available right now.

A challenge in delivering on the promise of open data is in making data production easy or <gasp> automatic. Ideally, it doesn't take a bunch of extra steps to convert budget data into a useful form. Making open formats and open standards. As a first step, there are a ton of opportunities for little integration points with proprietary systems. I only wish I had also attended the Open Data for Developers session.


Just Try It.

Pretty much everyone was ready to try new things - tools, strategies etc. That willingness is more important than any interest in any particular technology. Obviously, the group that attended is pretty self-selecting, but I was still heartened to hear enthusiasm from long-time public servants, folks who have probably been faced with 'the next big idea' too many times to count.


Help, Where Do I Start??

The day was about "convening a group of citizens and civil servants to share ideas about how technology can make government work better for all the citizens of the Empire State," so there was a ton of positive energy. Half of the conversations I had were just about releasing all those pent up ideas.

We were skimming across the pond's surface. Just right for a one day, first ever un-conference. I'm looking forward to getting farther into some of the projects that came out of it. A number of folks came with great ideas, and I hope their sessions felt encouraging. I feel like a two day affair (one day idea generation, second day action plans and sprints) could do good things in the future.

Congrats to Andrew Hoppin, Noel Hidalgo and the rest of the crew who put this event together. Looking forward to the next one.

There are probably a couple of additional blog posts that could come out of CapitolCamp, but I'll stick with just one for now.

I’ve been having some discussions with people at the Chicago Open Government group, talking about data openness. One common complaint all around is about data exported as PDFs. The particular topic we were discussing was TIFs. TIFs (Tax Increment Financing) are something a city can use to try to improve a neighborhood, and fund the improvements with the increased tax revenue from rising property values in those neighborhoods. These are used in many cities, and seem generally surrounded by an air of controversy.

Chicago in particular recently passed a law to open up TIF information. How the data is opened up isn’t specified that closely, and probably will be via published PDFs, along with some shape files to define the neighborhoods. (Shape files seem relatively easy to attain, probably because they are already most easily managed electronically.)

There was some vague talk about opening up the data as XML… but what would that even mean? To be fair to the city, the TIFs are actually defined by documents, and a PDF is a relatively accurate representation.

In general this idea of “XML” is confusing. XML is just a syntax for holding structured data. But there’s no particular structure that this data should conform to. There is MathML for talking about mathematical equations. There is KML for geographical information. But there’s no TIFML, no PolicyML, no GovernmentML. Though, somewhat surprisingly to me, there is a government sponsored StrategyML and what appears to be an aborted attempt at PlanningML. I have reservations about any markup language, which I’ll discuss below, but if people want these documents in StrategyML then that would mean something, XML is not that meaningful.

What is the purpose of opening up TIF data? Maybe:

1. See how much money is redirected to the TIF
2. See what that money is used for
3. See any measurable outcomes of the TIF
4. See the TIF charter, the document identifying what purpose the TIF is supposed to serve

There is some budgeting data that would be an excellent candidate for a structured presentation. But a substantial portion of the information is not structured. The charter has no structure, it is a narrative document. It is also essential context to understanding anything else. You can’t say that the budget is too big or that any one item is wasteful, except in relation to the purpose of the TIF, and that charter defines the purpose. A TIF zone set up to encourage tourism should be managed much differently than a zone where they are fighting urban blight, or encouraging light industry, or pursuing transit-oriented development.

Also there is the simple question of fact. A TIF is a political entity, set up by politicians, and it is a formal agreement. All the people involved work with documents. They do not write markup. The document means what was on paper. Extracting underlying semantics is not true to the process itself.  (In this I am quite influenced by the principles of Microformats.)

So, what to do? The answer I see is one of annotation, not structure. The document should be posted in as accessible a manner as can also be accurate. HTML, preferably as simple as possible, is an excellent candidate, nearly as representative as PDF but more accessible (though PDF allows you to guard against OCR errors by keeping the original scan more present). From there portions of the document should be tagged. If there is a commitment from the city, tag it as such. If there is an expected outcome, tag that. Make the document easy to reference in granular pieces, so people can discuss the details.

At some point there’s either a story worth telling with the data, or there isn’t. The story may be one of success, or one of corruption, or simply one that puts TIF financing in context with a city budget. But there’s no one answer about what you will get out of this information. You can’t dump all this data into a computer and tell it how well things are going.  Structure involves a rebuilding of the data, but when we don’t know why we want to rebuild the data, when we don’t know what we want to know, I believe the more distributed notion of annotation is a better fit.