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.

 

Our OpenGeo division is on the hunt for a talented systems administrator to help develop their suite of open source geospatial solutions.

The OpenGeo team develops spatial web services based on Java and clients in JavaScript. Our primary technology stack consists of Linux, Postgresql with a spatial extension, Jetty or Tomcat to run our servlets. We use webservers for static content and proxying. Additionally, we provide a few services to the projects we are involved in, such as Trac, Wordpress, and build bots for automated testing. A system administrator dedicated to this team provides a platform for running these services, as well as a supporting role for a team of 9 highly dedicated software developers and outreach engineers. There may also be some consulting work for clients, either to avoid scalability issues or to help debug problems on production servers.

The position provides you with the chance to design the infrastructure that you think is best suited to get the job done. A good candidate should therefore be analytical, self-driven and able to handle multiple tasks. We emphasize understanding fundamental concepts and being able to find more information, as opposed to experience with advanced tools. For instance, you should be familiar with /proc and the various tools used to extract information from this resource, as well as manually query HTTP based services.

Full job description..

The Open Planning Project is partnering with the PenTales Storytelling Projects to develop an interactive web app for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The application will serve as an interactive platform for New Yorkers of all ages to share and collaborate on stories they have produced through hand-writing, digital-writing, photography, moving pictures, voice media and other forms of communication. The platform will first pilot in New York City and will later be expanded to include other American urban and rural communities.

PenTales is seeking a talented, civic-minded volunteer developer to make the project happen. The developer will work very closely with PenTales and NYC Department of Parks and Recreation staff from start to finish, with guidance from TOPP’s developers.

The app will be built using the python-based open source Community Almanac code base. This same code is also being actively developed with other projects.

You can view the full job description on our jobs page. Please pass it on!

We were blown away by the great turnout at last Friday’s Tech for Participatory Planning workshop.  Thanks to RPA for hosting with us, and to everyone who came out for a great afternoon of lightning talks, brainstorming, and discussion.  It’s clear that we just scratched the surface here, and we raised way more questions than answers.

The questions we closed with were: what was your “a-ha moment?”  about technology and city planning, and, more importantly, what should we do next to dig deeper into these issues?   Scanning the Blogosphere, Frank from RPA has already written up two concrete ideas: Tech / planner speed dating and Mapping the state of collaborative planning.  Both a are worth a read, and we’ll be posting other ideas here as they surface.

For follow-up, we’ve joined forces with Christian Madera, host of the excellent City Planning, Civic Engagement and the Internet Summit at Princeton last spring, and will be conversing over at the PlanningTech Google Group that came out of that event.  The raw notes from Friday’s workshop have been posted there already.

Looking forward to what’s next…

It’s official!  We are pleased to announce that GeoServer has been accepted into incubation at the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).  Putting GeoServer under the same roof as all the best geospatial projects in the open source world is a great advance for the project.  While GeoServer is not yet an official OSGeo project, just getting accepted in to the incubation process is a firm indicator that we are on the right track.  The process makes sure that we meet all of OSGeo’s standards for a diverse community, a robust governance structure, and clean code that others can rely upon.  We believe GeoServer has all of these, but additional validation from a third party like OSGeo signals to the world that it is so.  Thanks to the incubation committee and the board for approving our application, and to Richard Gould for serving as our mentor.  And of course to the whole GeoServer community for taking us here.

Last week the first NYC BigApps meetup was held at our office and later this month on November 21st we’ll also serve as the venue for the NYC BigApps DevCamp (please RSVP).

The meetup last week was a good opportunity for app developers to learn more about the process and have a chance to talk to the people facilitating the contest. Brandon Kessler from ChallengePost led the meetup and helped to better explain the contest. Peter Robinson from NYC EDC was there to help explain the objectives and background of BigApps. Sam Litt and Murugan Kanpa from the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) were there to help answer a number of questions and field a lot of feedback about city data and NYC DataMine. Lou Klepner helped live-stream the meetup and the video is now available on Vimeo:

NYC BigApps - Nov 2, 2009 - Final from Lou Klepner on Vimeo.

Join us on December 12th as we host an NYC event for Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon.

We’ll be working a handful of projects, including CivicDB, FixMyStreet (Django), and the Local Representative Lookup.  If you’re interested in any of those, please come join us.  If you want to work on something else, please also come join us (and add your suggestions here or here).

Event details:

Civic Hacking @ The Great American Hackathon
Saturday, December 12th, 10:00am – 6:00pm
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette Street, PH
NY, NY 10013
RSVP: http://civichackathon09.eventbrite.com/

We hope to see you there!

November 13, 2009
12:30 pm	to	5:30 pm

Dear friend / planner / city staffer / community organizer / software engineer / entrepreneur / planning geek:

The Open Planning Project and the Regional Plan Association would like to invite you to an upcoming workshop to brainstorm new technology for participatory city planning.

When: Friday, November 13th, 12:30 – 5:30pm  (followed by a happy hour on our roof).

Where: The Open Planning Project, 148 Lafayette St, NY, NY

What: An afternoon of discussion, brainstorming, and collaborative product designing.

RSVP: http://planningtechworkshop.eventbrite.com/ (please RSVP by 11/6, attendance is limited)

Why:

Everyday social computing, mobile technology, and the adoption of web 2.0 approaches by governments have laid the groundwork for far wider citizen involvement in civic life.  Citizens can now be involved earlier on, more frequently, and in more meaningful ways than was ever possible before.  How can these opportunities be leveraged for use in the city planning space? What are the technologies that will make this possible?  What are the bureaucratic, logistical, or social issues that need to be addressed in considering these ideas?  What tools could we build — today — that would be the most impactful?

The Open Planning Project is interested in developing free, open source tools to support citizen engagement in planning.  To that end, we are reaching out to the planning, government, nonprofit, citizen and tech communities to help us explore opportunities and share ideas.  This event should be the first of many, and will be a hands-on workshop aiming to bring together many diverse perspectives.

How:

The workshop will follow the unconference, or BarCamp, format, where sessions and talks are proposed and led by the participants of the workshop.  Please visit the workshop wiki at http://etherpad.com/GfjsHfnoGi to see the agenda, an overview of the format, and a list of proposed talks & sessions.  Please feel free to add your ideas directly to the wiki — we’ll also be reaching out to attendees in advance to prepare some talks & sessions.

Pass it along:

Please pass on this invitation to anyone who might be interested.  Attendance will be capped at 60 people, on a first-come, first-served basis, and we’re hoping for a mix of sectors and perspectives.  Please RSVP by 11/6 at http://planningtechworkshop.eventbrite.com/ We realize this is somewhat short notice, so we hope you are able to make it.

Thanks, and we’re looking forward to seeing you on the 13th!

Photo by Ivan Walsh on Flickr

Are you a web developer with Python and Geo chops, looking for a fun side project?  Even better, are you also a resident of Greater Boston, interested in city planning and civic engagement?  Do you know someone who is?

If so, let us know.  The Open Planning Project is partnering with the Somerville Community Corporation to develop an interactive web app to better engage citizens in the planning process around the Green Line extension project.  The app would be 100% open source, and would build off of some of the core tools we’ve been developing and using here at TOPP Labs and OpenGeo (including Django, OpenLayers, GeoServer, PostGIS, and components of Community Almanac & FixCity).

SCC is seeking a talented, civic-minded volunteer developer to make the project happen.  Here’s the full job description (short link: http://bit.ly/1PkM17).  The developer will work very closely with SCC from start to finish, with guidance from TOPP’s lead developers.  Please pass it on!

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!