Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Proposed agenda items for next Economic Development Meeting

 

Here are my submitted agenda items for the Franklin Economic Development Commission meeting scheduled for Monday, April 26 (6pm; room to be announced).

I'll post the agenda when it appears; unfortunately, there is no guarantee that any of these items will appear.

1) Digital Visioning Presentation: This will reprise the presentation I gave, at the mayor's request, to the Ad Hoc Development Process Review Committee. IT WOULD BE USEFUL TO HAVE POWERPOINT CAPABILITIES FOR THIS; I can make paper handouts if PowerPoint is not possible. [Note: I'm long overdue in sharing my Digital Visioning presentation here on SPRAWLED OUT. The illustration above is a preview.]

2) Franklin Trails Committee update: Walking Workshop and next steps.

3) Web 2.0 and Economic Development: Discussion of implementations to the City of Franklin website that can be made at little or no cost; discussion of FaceBook page for Franklin Economic Development news and issues; etc.

4) Re-engagement with/re-assessment of the 27th Street project: I'm told by Mayor Taylor that the Economic Development Commission is essentially responsible for the 27th Street Steering Committee, yet it is my opinion/observation that the EDC membership is woefully under-informed as to the issues facing the project as well as the monies being spent. (I note, for instance, that the 4/20/10 Common Council agenda item G.5 concerns the Drexel Avenue Interchange in relationship to 27th Street, and the EDC has not offered the Common Council a recommendation on the issue.)

I think we have to:

• Tear this thing down to its component pieces, review the timeline, and make sure this ongoing expenditure still makes sense in the current (and anticipated) economic climate, as well as in light of Oak Creek's evolving indifference; and
• If we're going forward, reassess the streetscape planning and design to leverage new federal grant and funding opportunities that accompany certain design choices that I do NOT see in any current streetscape drafts.

If the 27th Street reassessment means distributing a bunch of binders full of review information at this meeting and then holding the discussion at a subsequent meeting (after the EDC membership has had time to review the material), so be it.

Making technology work: Lone blogger leapfrogs city's Technology Commission

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Hats off to Franklin blogger Greg Kowalski for doing what the City of Franklin's Technology Commission evidently cannot; Simply visit his Franklin Today Community Meetings and Events page and you'll be presented with a GoogleCalendar interface loaded with city events and meetings (see above).

If you have a GoogleCalendar account, one click of the "subscribe" button (the little "+" in the lower right corner) integrates all of these events to your calendar and it automatically updates as needed.

Technology Commission: Can you emulate Kowalski and get this simple-but-extremely useful Web 2.0 implementation on the City of Franklin website, ASAP?

"Hey - this city-planning stuff is easy." SimCity Deluxe coming soon to iPhone

 
SimCity should be required "play therapy" for Common Council and Plan Commission members:

An updated version of the the preferred game for those who want to create cities and watch them prosper or founder is coming to the iPhone this summer. SimCity Deluxe from EA Mobile will have a user interface that improves on the current Sim City offering, with enhancements that make it look a bit more SimCity 4 on the PC. SimCity has been popular on the iPhone since it was released in 2008.

The game includes different seasons (with appropriate disasters, of course) and 7 starter cities just waiting for you to run them into the ground. The new version will sport improved frame rates, and the ability to modify terrain with a touch and swipe of your finger. These type of games go way back. I remember playing Santa Paravia which was a similar, but considerably more primitive economic simulation, way back when it was on the TRS-80. Ah, memories. The new SimCity Deluxe will work on the iPhone and iPod touch, and I reckon that you can count on an iPad version as well.[via Slide to Play]

via www.tuaw.com

A Driving Problem, Not a Texting Problem?

From: How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic » Blog Archive » A Driving Problem, Not a Texting Problem

I’ve always thought that most people really do not like to drive, or at least drive all that much. Why would they otherwise be so constantly engaged in non-driving activities?

Clive Thompson makes this point in an interesting new column at Wired.

Texting while driving is, in essence, a wake-up call to America. It illustrates our real, and bigger, predicament: The country is currently better suited to cars than to communication. This is completely bonkers.

Thompson has an idea for a technological solution to the problem:

So what can we do? We should change our focus to the other side of the equation and curtail not the texting but the driving. This may sound a bit facetious, but I’m serious. When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?

The answer, of course, is public transit. In many parts of the world where texting has become ingrained in daily life — like Japan and Europe — public transit is so plentiful that there hasn’t been a major texting-while-driving crisis. You don’t endanger anyone’s life while quietly tapping out messages during your train ride to work in Tokyo or Berlin.

I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say, for the current crop of young drivers, that texting — staying in electronic touch — is far more important than the act of driving. They also protest that they are uniquely well adapted to “handle” such behavior, overlooking the inconvenient fact that all the major studies of texting/cell-phone distraction have been conducted on college students, not at retirement homes.

The library discovers Facebook

If you're on Facebook, please become a fan of the Franklin Public Library, our community's most vital - and, arguably, only - public space. It's an easy way to keep up with programs and services offered at the library, a great city resource that we cannot take for granted.

Free Wi-Fi at Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Now Offering Free Wi-Fi [Wi-Fi]:

Wi-Fi at Starbucks is SUPPOSED to be free, but it's unreliable. B&N is gonna sell a lot of coffee.

Via Lifehacker: "In case you spend a lot of your time thumbing through books or drinking coffee in or around a Barnes & Noble bookstore, you'll be glad to know that B&N is now the proud distributor of free Wi-Fi through AT&T. They've offered Wi-Fi for quite some time, of course, but now you no longer have to pay for it." Photo by grilled cheese. [Macworld]

Municipal complaint? There's an app for that

Boston to debut ‘killer app’ for municipal complaints - The Boston Globe.

City officials say the application, dubbed Citizen Connect, is the first of its kind in the nation. It was designed as an extension of the city’s 24-hour complaint hotline for the younger set, making the filing of complaints quicker and easier for iPhone users.

“If I’m just walking along the sidewalk and I have a complaint - maybe a storm knocked downed a tree - I could take a photo and send it immediately,’’ said Christopher Loh, 28, a press assistant in the mayor’s office who helped come up with the idea for the program. “You don’t have to bumble around looking for a number to call. It’s right there in the palm of your hand.’’

While some local Councils turn to new media, Franklin still flipping cassettes

GoogleMap image uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

We have a fairly serious transparency problem here in Franklin. The city website is fairly incomprehensible, and staffing shortages mean that it'll be a long time before resources can be devoted to making it easier for people to know what meetings are upcoming and what projects and developments are pending.

Want to follow a development or issue through myriad meeting and committees? Forget it; the city of Franklin website assumes that you have time to search through EVERY POSSIBLE AGENDA (in PDF format  - so you have to download them first) for your development or issue rather than simply list developments and then add to it every meeting and document that is related (see it done right at the city of Davis, California website).

Of course, I highly suspect that not everyone in local government wants information and processes to be easily accessible. The emergence of local blogs has been a source of extreme discomfort for many longtime local pols, and has arguably contributed to the resignation of more than one of the "old boys" who did not appreciate the extra scrutiny.

I also suspect this is why we still see city meetings stop regularly - in the year 2009! -  so someone can flip the cassette used to record the meeting!

Still, they're slipping 'em by us now and then.

For instance: Did you know the city might actually spend stimulus money (with Greendale) to, inexplicably, widen 51st street to four lanes between Rawson and College Ave.? AND, did you know that St. Paul's Church (see above; it's beautiful even in a GoogleMaps screenshot) will have to be torn down to accommodate that folly? (More on that later).

District 3 Alderperson Kristen Wilhelm sends out regular emails alerts (the only reason I know about 51st Street) and updates her website; it may be time to get her and the other council members Twitter accounts so they can send and be sent news during meetings.

In the UK, they seem to be on top of the possibilities of new media in keeping local government answerable to the people:

Councils turn to new media:

Local authorities have been using social media to keep residents informed about how the heavy snowfalls have affected services.

Authorities including Lichfield and  Babergh district councils used micro-blogging site Twitter to announce canceled bin collections while Newcastle city council used  its Twitter account to keep parents informed about school closures.

Other councils including Barnet, Southwark and Hillingdon had regular website updates. Increasing numbers of councils and councillors are turning to social media to communicate with residents. Latest figures suggest more than 20 councils and a further 40 individual councillors have Twitter accounts and Newcastle city council recently became the first to use Twitter to announce the results of a by-election.

Alastair Smith, communications advisor  at Newcastle city council, believes the use of new media is part of the democratisation of information and can lead to greater openness  and transparency.

He said: “It’s a great way to engage with the citizen. Rather than it being a one-way communication, it’s two-way. If you are putting a message out there, it’s important to hear what people think about it.”

The use of online media is growing. Over the past year the use of Twitter has rocketed nearly 1,000%. Mr Smith believes that with the number of traditional news sources diminishing  it will be increasingly important for councils to maintain an online presence.

“While it is important to maintain a relationship with traditional media, if people are  looking at YouTube we need to be there. We need to have a presence where our customers are,” he said.

Communicating in a Digital Age

Increasing numbers of councils and councillors are turning to social media to communicate with residents and to keep up to date with what is happening in their local communities. Alison Purdy looks at how councillors are getting to grips with the digital age.

Is social media a useful tool for councils and councillors to communicate with residents?

Twitter is one of the latest social media buzzes. Although it has been around for a while it is now starting to gain more widespread popularity as more people as increasing numbers of people start to use it. Celebrities from Stephen Fry to Barack Obama use Twitter accounts to update their fans. Nationally the Conservative party is on Twitter, along with No 10, the Foreign Office and Parliament. But there is also a vibrant community of people posting updates who are involved in local government and a number of councils using Twitter as part of their engagement drive.

Latest figures suggest that more than 20 councils are using Twitter with a further 40 individual councillors regularly posting their own personal messages, known as tweets. Newcastle city council became the first local authority in the UK to announce election results in real time through the social networking site. The Fenham ward by-election results were sent to ‘followers’ of the council – people signed up to read their messages – through the website or on their mobile phones as soon as they were announced.

And more recently councils around the country used Twitter to keep residents up to date with the latest weather situation and the impact the snow storms were having on council services. Here are some examples of how councillors are using Twitter and other social media to get their message across.

Twitter

 Cllr James Cousins (Con) Wandsworth council Twitter is often portrayed in the media as a festival of celebrity banality but it is a valuable medium, where diverse people congregate, contribute and discuss. I first became aware of its power through Twitter conversations about local government engagement, and from there it was an obvious step to use it as a councillor. My approach, in short, has been to ‘be human’. I use my personal account and try to avoid too much about the town hall, which I suspect even I would find dull. Instead I try to make my ‘tweets’ either encourage discussion or be informative, but that doesn’t stop me discussing TV or celebrating my team’s rare wins.

What is surprising is not just how many local people were tweeting, but how many were eager to engage and use Twitter to communicate with their councillor. While I often sit in a draughty library with no-one attending my surgery it is quite the reverse in the ‘Twitterverse’ where people are keen to ask questions or air local issues with me. In the past week alone parks, parking, traffic, policing and business issues have all been raised with me via Twitter. Like any dialogue, you get out what you put in. For me, Twitter has been incredibly rewarding

Facebook

Cllr Daniel Cox (Con) Norfolk county council Norfolk county council recently used Facebook as a tool in our campaign to get the government to bring forward the dualling of the final single carriageway stretch of the A11 – a major route into, and out of, Norfolk. Our two-month campaign resulted in 16,000 people signing either a hard copy, or the online, petition, with an additional 3,200 joining our Facebook group.

The business community regarded the dualling as vital for boosting competitiveness and improving the perception of Norfolk as a great place in which to do business. The economic benefits of dualling the road are estimated at £600m – far outweighing the cost of construction. Thousands of people who live in Norfolk, or have links with the county, have Facebook accounts and many Norfolk-related groups already existed. This gave us an opportunity to reach an existing online Norfolk community – many of whom had direct experience of this section of the A11.

Different audience

Some of these people may have kept in touch with news via the local media, and some may have seen the petition in our libraries, or on our website, but many wouldn’t have, and Facebook provided us with a direct way of reaching a different campaign audience. We linked up with a number of groups, including Norfolk live music venues – stressing the benefits it could bring in terms of bands and DJs finding it an easier and quicker location to reach.

We also targeted online football forums – mainly related to Norwich City football club, but also forums of teams who were heading into Norfolk to play during the time we ran the campaign. Ultimately we were able to access groups of people who conventionally would have shown little interest in local government campaigns – personalising the benefits for their specific interests. The result was that transport secretary Geoff Hoon announced that dualling would be brought forward to 2010 – the first road scheme he has announced since being in office.

YouTube

Cllr Maureen McGarvey (Con) Blackburn with Darwen council. I’m the first to admit that I still use one finger to type on my computer keyboard. But when it comes to trying new ways of connecting with our community I’m all in for it – even if I don’t always fully understand the tool being used. We were recently awarded the top possible ‘four score’ corporate assessment rating. It’s not easy to engage staff and the wider public with something like an inspection report. That’s why I was pleased to see some creativity with the communications.

Our chief executive was filmed being questioned in a journalistic style. His answers and relevant images from the borough were used to make a three-minute video. The idea was to show the story behind the Audit Commission rating. The video was posted on YouTube and the link was sent to staff and members via e-bulletins and further ‘seeded’ (I’m told that’s the right term) by emailing to partners and adding to relevant social message boards. Information about the video was given out on our website and the local paper ran a story. Innovation was one of our inspection strengths so it was only right that we did the same with celebrating the success. I believe we’re pioneers with the use of video in inspection communications and I’d recommend it to other councils. It certainly got people talking and that’s half the battle. The video can be found at www.youtube.com/BwDCtube 

Blogging

Cllr Clive Hudson (Lab) Wakefield council As Wakefield’s environment champion I have created an online diary to chronicle my family’s attempts to become greener and our switch to the new alternative weekly bin collection scheme. This blog is also an opportunity to try to encourage people who live, work and visit the district to take care of their environment. My family and I are very involved with keeping the district clean and green and as part of this we have changed to a more environmentally-friendly family car.

I live in Altofts which has now joined the new bin collection scheme. This encourages everyone to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill and, in turn, helps people to think about the amount of packaging they use. When I was asked if I would be interested in creating the blog it seemed the perfect time to get to grips with new technology and set-up an online diary so people can see how we are attempting to become greener and help the Wakefield district continue to be a place we can all be proud of.

Wakefield has so much to offer and I’m a strong believer that if we all work together, take pride in our places and say no to litter and waste, we can strengthen the area as a beautiful place to live, work and visit. Visitors to the online diary – at http:// cleanergreener.wakefield.gov.uk – can see how I have been preparing for the change, including getting rid of most of the bins at home.

Sendik's Twitters

Twitter / Sendiks

This could be useful in a thousand ways. I wonder if they'll Twitter me when they get my favorite cookies back in stock?

UPDATE: Yes, they will and did. I will know when Kashi™ TLC® Chewy Cookies in Oatmeal Dark Chocolate and Happy Trail Mix finally return from their voluntary recall.

Students play SimStateStreet to learn city planning principles

A few years back while doing a consulting gig for the city of Racine, I proposed and helped implement an event called SimCity Racine wherein, using a custom-designed SimCity template, we had various manufacturing, education, administrative, and commercial city leaders play the game to learn community development collaboration and a bit of cross-disipline empathy (i.e. we made each person responsible for a facet of SimRacine that was opposite of their real-world position). It was a huge success - - games and online simulations are excellent tools.

I've often thought about proposing a SimFranklin activity ...

Via JSOnline:

Students are game for controlling State St.

UW researchers' computer program teaches urban planning

By Stanley A. Miller II of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Dec. 7, 2008

Games thrust players into many roles: soldier, sorcerer, singer, sports star&ensp.&ensp.&ensp. 

And recently, a computer game designed by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers challenged some Riverside University High School students to reshape State St. in Madison by taking on the role of an urban planner.

There are no mighty armies or mystical powers in this game to impose policy and order - just tools for gathering data, changing neighborhood zoning and communicating with colleagues.

And there were no cheat codes if players got stuck. Students turned to "virtual mentors" - researchers in Madison reachable only through an instant-messaging program - to answer questions as they progressed through the challenge.

"I haven't tried a game like this before, but I chat online a lot," Maria Fregoso, a Riverside sophomore, said as she tackled the beginning stages of the game the first day. "I volunteered because I thought this would be a good experience for me."

About a dozen students tried out UW's latest version of the Urban Science game late last month - "the cream of the crop, as well as some students who could use this to move forward," said Chris Levas, an engineering and science teacher at Riverside who selected the group.

The game was run after school through Riverside's community learning center and coordinated by Milwaukee Recreation, which might introduce it to other centers, according to Brian Hoffer, a spokesman for the department.

Remote experiment

Urban Science has evolved substantially since it was developed in 2004, according to Elizabeth Bagley, a graduate student in UW's Epistemic Games Research Group who now is in charge of the project. She noted that this latest trial was to test how well the game can be run remotely, which is important if the experience is to be accessible to as many students as possible.

The students took on the task professionally and quickly embraced the online chat feature, firing off questions to Bagley's colleagues as she kept vigil over them in the Riverside computer lab.

After setting up his personal profile on the game's Web portal, where all the action takes place, sophomore Jorge Montiel scrutinized online photos and historical information to gather background on Madison's popular downtown strip.

Christian Medina, who was sitting next to him, said Urban Science was easy to get into and understand.

"It's fun because we are talking to people," he said.

As urban designers, the students had to consider issues such as affordable housing, parking, ecological issues and crime, while balancing the desires of special interest groups such as businesses, a cultural preservation organization and other community advocates.

"There are tradeoffs and consequences, and these are things they need to deal with as a planner," Bagley said. "They are learning how to really facilitate compromises because there are stakeholders whose goals don't overlap."

The game also teaches teamwork, collaboration and diplomacy while "connecting young people with their environment," Bagley said.

"They are seeing their city as a system," Bagley said. "Cities are not built by people behind closed doors."

Browser-friendly update

In the latest version of the game, students used a Web-based program called iPlan that doesn't require software to be installed on a computer. The system let them view a map of the area they had to redesign, rezone different parts, and view the results by logging into a Web portal.

Players also used in-game e-mail in which they received messages from a fictitious boss who gave them assignments, as well as a computer-controlled community facilitator who helped them navigate the neighborhood interest groups.

"In the past, we had planning consultants in the room," Bagley said. "One of the reasons we are making this switch is because it is not feasible that multiple classrooms all over the world have a four-students-to-one instructor ratio."

Over four days, the students researched and discussed the best strategies for balancing business issues such as adding parking with environmental concerns such as the desire for green space.

Hoffer, the Milwaukee Recreation spokesman, said the department wants to offer the game at other community learning centers in the future, but he isn't sure when that might happen.

"We all love the experience and what it means to the kids," Hoffer said. "But it boils down to funding."

The UW researchers noted that they gathered valuable information during the trial at Riverside and are applying for more grants to help continue their work - money that could bring Urban Science back to town.

"One of the things I'm really impressed with is their intense focus," Bagley said on the last day of the game as things were winding down and the students were close to submitting their proposals. "It's pretty quiet in here, and what that shows is this game is very engaging. They really have bought into this 'company' and this mission."

She also stressed that the players take the game seriously because they are treated like adults, not students.

Betsy Flores, a sophomore, said on the final day that although the game was challenging at first, she learned a lot, especially how changing the zoning of an area can affect the environment.

"I liked the map part the most and moving things around," Flores said. "People really like parks, and restaurants... can bring a lot of trash."