The Mayors’ Innovation Summit will provide an important forum for dialog among mayors, information and technology officers, civic innovators, technology executives and the non- profit sector to share their vision of thecity of the future. This three day event will engage participants in a variety of workshops and panel discussions. By engaging in a variety of workshops and panel discussions, participants will create a shared outlook about how metropolitan workshops and panel discussions, participants will create a shared outlook about how metropolitan places will serve their communities in the future. The program will explore how innovation and technology can engage community, improve quality of life and drive the creation of cities as places of choice for both residents and visitors.

OpenGeo received funding from Vanedge Capital, a Vancouver-based venture capital firm who led the Series A round of investment. This investment allows OpenGeo to become independent and to continue developing excellent geospatial software for its clients.

“We are proud that our incubation with OpenPlans has been so successful,” noted Chris Holmes, OpenGeo’s founder. “We look forward to growing our contributions to open source communities as a dedicated open source geospatial software company.”

The OpenGeo team is a collection of some of the best programmers, designers, and visionaries that a nerd will ever come across and we’ll miss having them in the OpenPlans’ family.

Community board staff spend hours collating and retyping meeting minutes into “dumb” Word documents; community members interested in a particular issue find it nearly impossible to construct a history of that issue from the available information; and community board members themselves often must rely on institutional memory.

OpenPlans’ solution is an an open source website publishing system that will make it easy for Community Boards to produce and share tagged and geo-located information for events and meeting notes. Creating “smart” meeting records will be as simple as publishing a blog post, and the improved template will give boards modern websites that incorporate social media and other requested features, such as:

• a powerful content management system for website publishing, enabling Community Board staff to add and edit content about Community Board activities, including text and graphics;
• a simple drafting tool for staff to produce and publish meeting notes, with searchable tags for topics, addresses and decisions made;
• a user-friendly navigation that makes it easy to explore the meeting information by topic, geography or other issues;
• a filterable map;
• integration for Facebook and Twitter, and other outreach tools that boards are using;
• a design that supports effective story-telling and communication about the issues of the Community Board, given the complexity of land use issues;
• integration with the wider web, through search engine-friendly content, links to other sites, etc.; and,
• an open-source core, building on solid foundations from other projects.

Well-designed, easy to use tools in multiple languages are also excellent as promotional materials, demonstrating that Community Boards are forward looking and genuinely interested in citizen engagement. In time, true digitization of board documents will mean that constituents and community board members can fully search them, create interactive maps, and follow issues that are important to them over time. Further, community board staff will be able to create and analyze reports of what the most important issues to their constituents are. Finally, when implemented in multiple districts, Community Boards will be able to compare data between districts.

I recently sat down with a group of passionate planners, hackers, and citizens at the APA Intelligent Cities Unconference morning session to discuss “Online Public Participation.”

We hypothesized why planners don’t involve citizens in planning decisions more often. We discussed the lack of a shared language, and the fact that planners can’t continue to communicate with citizens as if they’re talking to other planners. We all agreed that meaningful citizen input is often hindered by citizens not having all the facts or not being able to examine the data. But this is a difficult challenge, as planners generally have insufficient resources to help citizens understand the issues, especially online.

We talked about how, when it comes down to it, citizens (and hackers) don’t always know what planners even do or truly believe that their participation will make a difference. And while our discussion continued to generate more questions than answers, one reality became clear to me:

If we’re not building relationships, we’re doing it wrong!

To paraphrase Aaron Ogle, “What the web’s really good at is scaling and creating networks.” This is the heart of our work at OpenPlans. The web’s ability to scale solutions and connect people is a foundation for incredibly powerful relationship building, and it should be leveraged by hackers, planners, and citizens.

Planners are responsible for the sustainable development of our cities & neighborhoods, and they depend on citizens to provide the valuable feedback necessary to make many interrelated decisions (land use, transportation, safety, environmental factors, etc). They should also rely on hackers to build tools that make their outreach, research, and analysis more effective.

Citizens are beneficiaries—like it or not—of the efforts of planners to improve communities. But they’re taxed with the duty of being engaged in the decision making processes that effects their lives. With the help of civic-minded hackers, citizens should seek to become a greater part of these processes—in order to “like it” more often than “not.”

Hackers are the designers and developers building the tools for planning, As they build these tools, they should ask themselves several questions. Do these tools bring about meaningful participation? Do they result in meaningful outcomes? Do they strengthen the bonds between planners and citizens?

OpenPlans ♥ Planners + Citizens

At OpenPlans, we’re interested in building a complete planning toolbox containing all the necessary tools for communicating and gathering public input for planning projects. In doing so, we must be mindful that this toolbox shouldn’t simply make planners’ jobs easier. Although maximizing the limited resources of planners is very important, the outcomes are fundamentally for citizens. This toolbox should enable planners to better serve citizens and empower citizens to meaningfully contribute, thus democratizing the planning process. This toolbox should democratize the planning process to enable planners to better serve citizens and empower citizens to meaningfully contribute.

Transparency has a PR problem. All of us at Transparency Camp have drunk the Kool Aid, but outside of our bubble there are thousands of decision makers who are wary and distrustful of the things we talk about. Terms like “open data” conjure security concerns, and “transparency” just seems like a inviting constant scrutiny over how you and your staff do your jobs. Overall, there are looming questions of “why should we do this?”.

A combination of messaging and education is needed to increase the reach of transparency advocates. In this session, we would examine the problem (for the benefit of those who have had the good fortune to never encounter it first-hand), hear about some strategies that work to communicate ideas about transparency to “normal people”, and brainstorm how to scale these strategies.

Transparency Camp
“Selling Transparency”  - Mjumbe Poe
Saturday 5/4/13 @ 11:30am

The Marvin Center @ GWU
800 21st Street Northwest
Washington, DC 20052

But what if you want to do more than just register a suggestion or complaint? Our Community Projects Platform is a great place to start a conversation, get feedback on proposed solutions, create surveys about what your neighbors want, and maybe even come to a consensus about the best way forward.

The Community Projects Platform features:

• Place-based discussion–the ability to connect discussions to specific locations.
• Watch areas–people can follow what’s being discussed by locations that are important to them.
• Surveys and voting–community members have ideas, some good, others not so good. Finding out what people think ahead of a meeting saves time.
• Public input–Community Boards need to take public input on proposals. Doing this online makes it easier for more people to participate and follow along.

Could these tools be used by Community Boards themselves? After all, the full board and various committees have many issues to discuss in their monthly meetings. The discussion tool gives them a place to “listen in” to what individuals and advocacy groups are saying beforehand. Background information can be presented and digested prior to meetings, saving the in-person time for questions and decision making. And, in the case of big projects, like converting a side street into a plaza, the process takes a long time. Using online discussion tools can be a way of creating and maintaining enthusiasm.

I know what you’re thinking. What about New York State’s Open Meetings Law (OML, Sections 100-111 of the New York State Public Officers Law), which requires that all meetings of public bodies be open to the public? Wouldn’t an online discussion among Community Board members violate the OML?

The law itself is silent on this point, leading me to believe that as long as the discussion site were open to everyone, and not just Community Board members, there wouldn’t be a problem. Like all our tools, we’re thinking about accessibility to all web users, good mobile design, and translations, so all members of the community will be able to participate in discussing the future of their neighborhood.

Thanks to the generous support of our founder, OpenPlans is able to provide tools to Community Boards free of charge. Read more about our tools for boards. We’ll meet with you, learn about your needs and aspirations, find a good project to work on, set up the software, and train your volunteers in its use. Interested? Contact us today! 

More details and RSVP.