The Open Planning Project

On February 25th at 6pm, we will be hosting a live web-cast of a talk Lawrence Lessig is giving at Harvard Law School. This lecture promises to be a really fun and informative event, and where better to enjoy it with friends than on the couches at TOPP? The event will also include refreshments and a presentation by RE/Mixed Media Festival 2010.

Location:
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette Street (nr Howard)
Penthouse Floor

RSVP: You must RSVP in advance, via the RSVP link under 'The Open Planning Project,' on this page.

About The Event:

Lawrence Lessig, the foundational voice of the free culture movement, will deliver a talk on fair use, politics, and online video. If you are not able to join us at TOPP, you can tune in to a live webcast at openvideoalliance.org/lessig. Join the mailing list for updates.

The lecture will last 45 minutes, and it will be followed by a 30 minute interactive Q & A session. The event will be moderated by Elizabeth Stark of the Open Video Alliance. Questions can be submitted using the hashtag #wireside.

This is a talk about copyright in a digital age, and the role (and importance) of a doctrine like “fair use.” Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video.

As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage participation, not just passive consumption. Tune in here on February 25th, 6:00pm US Eastern time (GMT -5), or check out our screening events in cities across the world.

The Wireside Chat is made possible with the support of iCommons and the Ford Foundation.

Early in March, join Creative Commons and TOPP for a really interesting event showcasing the ways that Creative Commons licenses are being applied in learning contexts. The lineup:

• Eric Frank, founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial textbook publishing company that is leveraging CC licenses as part of their business model—basically offering free digital textbooks via CC BY-NC-SA, but charging for the prints and supplementary materials. (Is this business model working? Come and find out!) Eric was previously “Director of Marketing for Prentice Hall Business Publishing, a division with annual sales in the hundreds of millions.”
• Neeru Paharia, co-founder of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a grassroots education project that moves learning outside of institutional walls (for free) by leveraging the internet, social software, and CC licensed content. Neeru is formerly the Executive Director of Creative Commons and is finishing up her doctorate at the Harvard Business School in Behavioral Economics.
• A panel of K-12 technologists/educators on the cutting edge of their fields who incorporate CC licenses and social media into their classrooms. They will give a run-down on what they do, how they do it, and answer questions about the challenges they face from curious folk like you. The panel consists of:  Dave Bill, Technology Integrator at the Dwight School and TEDxNYED organizer; arvind s grover, co-host of 21st Century Learning (a podcast about… 21st century learning) and Director of Technology at the Hewitt School (also a TEDxNYED organizer); and Kerri Richardson Redding, Director of Academic Technology at the Brooklyn Friends School.

Please RSVP for this event in advance via Facebook.

Location:

The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette St, Penthouse Floor
Between Grand & Howard
New York, NY  

Attention all NYC and metro area teachers! Livable Streets Education (LSE) invites you to participate in our free training sessions to enliven your classroom this spring! LSE develops inquiry-based lessons that use the streets outside your school as a laboratory and helps you connects these ideas to your Core Curriculum.

RSVP here.

What’s Involved?

Teachers will be given a free set of printed materials including a Teacher’s Guide, lesson plans and worksheets for students.  Our units consist of 6-12 core lessons, with suggested extensions and resources.  All of our K-12 projects take an interdisciplinary approach to environmental education, include a civic engagement component, and culminate in a creative project that conveys lessons learned to the larger community.

Our professional development program includes hands-on experience and step-by-step training in March to make it easy to bring these lessons to life in your classroom this spring.  Participants can adapt these lessons to best suit their schedule and learning goals.  An additional training session will be held in April to help extend these ideas to service learning projects.

The Units

Please see our flyer or contact us for additional information about each unit.
•    Elementary:  K/1 The Streets Around Us
•    Elementary:  2/3 Getting Around Town
•    Elementary: 4/5 Green Streets
•    Middle School:  6-8 The Air That I Breathe
•    Middle School: 6-8 Re-design Your Street
•    High School: 9-12 Making a Livable Community

Training Schedule

Trainings will be held on March 9, 10 and 11th, from 5pm-8pm in The Open Planning Project penthouse at 148 Lafayette Street. Free dinner will be included at each training session.

• Tuesday, March 9, 5pm - All Elementary School Units
  
• Wednesday, March 10, 5pm - All Middle School Units
• Thursday, March 11, 5pm - High School Unit

The good folks at NYC Python are back with a dress rehearsal for this year's PyCon. Three NYC area pythonistas will be presenting their PyCon talks:

• Roy Hyunjin Han - How Python is guiding infrastructure construction in Africa (30min - Intermediate)
  
• Justin Lilly - Customizing your editor for maximum productivity (30m - Beginner)
  
• Wes McKinney - Python in Quantitative Finance (30min - Beginner)

Longer descriptions and RSVP information are available here.

Also, if you're looking to give a lightning talk at PyCon, why not run through it with local friends first? Let NYC Python know and they will get you scheduled.

NOTE: because we have 3 presentations we'll be starting right on time at 7PM, so please be on time!

Location:
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette Street, nr Howard
Penthouse Floor

The US National Weather Service has a lot of weather to watch! They have sensors all over the continent, and in space, ranging from simple thermometers to orbiting satellites. When weather happens (and let’s be honest, weather is always happening, it’s happening on me right now) it happens fast — how does the NWS take in the whole situation at a glance and make decisions? On a map, of course.

The NWS Central Region Headquarters has built a test-bed for putting their situational information onto web maps, and the toolset they used is the OpenGeo suite of applications: PostGIS, Geoserver, OpenLayers. They also used raster-data standby GDAL for handling gridded data conversions.

A paper on their work (”Development of Web-based GIS Applications for Decision Support and Situational Awareness“) was presented by Brian Walawender at the  American Meteorological Association Annual Meeting this week.

As part of Social Media week, we're very excited to be hosting a discussion with Mayor Bloomberg's 2009 digital media strategist and a number of other leading lights in the field of 'social media and democracy:'

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s successful 2009 re-election campaign relied on social media to engage supporters and get out the vote.  In many significant ways, the Bloomberg campaign extended the social media lessons and successes of the 2008 presidential campaigns, but into a different context.  In the end, the Bloomberg campaign came away with far more Facebook supporters and Twitter followers than his main opponent -- but did social media really make a difference in the outcome? What does NYC 2009 herald for the elections in 2010?

In this exclusive talk with the lead digital media strategist for Bloomberg 2009 -- Jonah Seiger of Connections Media, LLC -- we’ll explore the strategy and tactics behind the Bloomberg campaign’s use of social media like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, along with online advertising, and how they measured success.

This discussion will feature Kate Kaye, Senior Editor of ClickZ News and author of “Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,” and Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum.

Please join us for a beer and wine cocktail reception, sponsored by ClickZ, following the discussion.

Location

The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette St (nr Howard)
Penthouse Floor
NY, NY 10013

RSVP: here (event is now sold out, sorry!).

Course Description: