The Open Planning Project

Our readers know how impactful civic-minded journalism can be, but it is also an honor to receive outside confirmation from esteemed organizations. Two TOPP projects were recently singled out as true movers in their fields:

GothamSchools won first place in the national Educational Writers Association's 'best education blog' category for their excellent coverage of the New York City education scene. This prestigious contest annually honors the best education reporting in print and broadcast media, and it is the only award of its kind. GothamSchools rose to the top among more than 300 entries, and we feel very proud to be recognized and to find ourselves in such esteemed company. Congratulations to the reporting staff: Anna, Elizabeth, Maura, and Philissa.

Out on the other coast, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has announced that Streetsblog San Francisco and SFBC Volunteer Michael Helquist are the recipients of this year's Golden Wheelie Awards. This honor recognizes transportation heroes in the Bay Area, and in their announcement the SFBC explained that they made the award to Streetsblog due to the blog's "intelligent journalism that is leading the conversation and helping more people understand the connection between bicycling, great streets and a livable city." Bryan, Matthew, and Michael, well done and keep up the great work.

 

As San Francisco and Washington D.C. prepare to launch their new APIs we’d like to have other cities and managers of 311 services show their support for implementing an interoperable standard for these APIs. The more cities get behind this effort, the better for developers, for city budgets, and for citizens. Showing a critical mass of support for using this standard will help encourage developers, other cities, and existing 311 services to become more invested in the potential of an interoperable system.

A standard means that people can use their favorite app in every city and developers can focus on new features rather than different requirements for each city. Everyone can then benefit from new innovations built from a common foundation. Additionally, interoperability is helpful not only to simplify the offering of citizen interfaces, but also to help unify and better facilitate inter-agency coordination for city managers.

To date, the people who have joined San Francisco and Washington D.C. by showing their support for implementing a standard API include directors of these services and CIO or CTOs in cities like Boston, Portland, Edmonton, Seattle, and Los Angeles as well as those from services like SeeClickFix and Ushahidi.

Please take the pledge and show your support.

In preparing some data for our next round of training courses, I spent a fair amount of time today processing and cleaning the US Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) database for 2008. The FEC is extremely good about releasing their data, even though it looks like they have to dump it out of a very old database system.

I processed the three main files, and then converted the associated code tables into side tables, so the whole thing is pretty self-contained and hopefully self-explanatory. I had originally hoped to fully replicate something like the FundRace site from 2008, but since the FEC data only has zip-code as a location entity, that is not going to happen this time around. I assume the FundRace folks also had access to a nationwide telephone directory or some other way of taking name and zip-code and using that to leverage out an actual street address.

If you are interested in playing with the FEC data and don’t feel like spending a couple hours mucking about in Perl to get it into tables, I’ve placed a PostgreSQL dump file online. Candidates are linked to individuals via committees. The FEC model has a lot of complexity hiding in it, with some committees not associated with candidates, and so on, so using the data correctly will probably require a little care.

Between 2001 and 2009, the share of trips that Americans made in cars dropped by more than four percent, with walking, bicycling and transit use picking up the slack, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last year, 11.9 percent of all trips were on foot or by bike, while 4.2 percent of trips were on transit. Both figures signify major increases.

The National Household Travel Survey, the source of the new stats, is the gold-standard for transportation data. As Mobilizing the Region reported, while the Census only tracks how people get to work, the NHTS gathers data on all trips taken. It also distinguishes between, say, driving to a park-and-ride bus area and walking to the local bus stop.

The downside to the NHTS is how infrequently the survey is conducted, which makes it difficult to determine how much the 2009 data reflects a larger trend, and how much may be due to temporary changes brought on by fluctuating gas prices and the recession.

The high quality of NHTS data means that it can supplement NYC DOT's own numbers, which have shown a large rise in cycling over the same period. We've put in a request to the state DOT and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council to get access to city-level data once it becomes available. 

February 25, 2010
6:00 pm	to	8:00 pm

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.

 

March 3, 2010
7:00 pm	to	10:00 pm

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  

February 9, 2010
7:00 pm	to	9:00 pm

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.

February 1, 2010
5:00 pm	to	6:15 pm

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!).

San Francisco recently established a new policy requiring open source software to be considered equally with commercial software within the city’s procurement process. It’s important to note the actual inclusion of the word “equal” in this policy. Emphasis here is mine:

The Software Evaluation Policy will require departments to consider open source alternatives, when available, on an equal basis to commercial software, as these may reduce cost and speed the time needed to bring software applications to production.

— San Francisco Open Source Policy

This is much like the legislation passed in Vancouver last May:

Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles;

— Vancouver Open Source & Open Data Policy

Back in September, I think Portland actually initiated the “First-In-Nation Open Source Software Policy for City Government,” but the language in Portland’s resolution is definitely not as strong:

Establish best practices for analysis of business requirements in software review and selection processes, identify existing commercial software systems with licenses that are scheduled to expire in the near future, and encourage the consideration of Open Source Software in the review, replacement and continual improvement of business solutions;

— Portland Open Source & Open Data Policy

Portland’s resolution should be amended from “encourage the consideration” to “require equal consideration” and other cities should make sure that they provide measurable policies for using Open Source rather than simply to “encourage consideration.”

These developments are huge and these cities deserve to be lauded as great pioneers, but we also need to help support them and to spread these kinds of policies to other cities. You can learn more and contribute to the creation of resources for open cities with the nascent OpenMuni project.