Around 10 p.m. last night, Barack Obama’s official Facebook page reached 1 million supporters. The news has generated buzz, and rightfully so. It dwarfs John McCain’s 147,000+ supporters, demonstrating his breadth of support. (techPresident has charts of various online popularity metrics) Politico’s Ben Adler reported the two campaign’s internal social networking tools have similar numbers […]
Software for E-Government
A topic I have begun to explore is the best e-government software to support public participation in urban planning. I’ve previously written about LimeHouse‘s tool, which amounts to a web-based document management system that supports the equivalent of blog comments on document sections. Adobe has been advertising their LiveCycle suite of tools heavily on the […]
The Wrong Way the Solicit Participation on the Web
I noticed two flawed attempts to solicit public participation on the web recently. First, on Tuesday Hillary Clinton said the following during her nationally televised speech: “Now the question is, where do we go from here … But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and […]
Urban Planning and E-Government
This post is Part 1 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning, which received the University of Maryland Urban Studies and Planning Larry Reich Award for Best Final Paper. Since the advent of information technology, there has been intense […]
Txt with Obama
Yesterday it was brought to my attention not all of my friends who support Obama have signed up for his text messaging list. Subscribers receive short messages roughly once a week or less, related to major announcements in the campaign, primaries, and media appearances. You can sign up online, or by texting GO to OBAMA […]
The Need for a Social Mapping
There’s a reason I told Planning magazine I’m excited about “more accessible and interactive approaches to the massive amounts of GIS data that planners have.” After all, it’s a type of data that has not yet been adapted to truly seamless social platform. I sketched out how such a system could be applied to vacant […]
Urban Planning With Digital Tools
This month’s Planning magazine features a story about the uses of technology for urban planning that features quotes from me. (Planning is the monthly member magazine of American Planning Association.) The article describes the blogs, video and photo sharing, survey, and other online now available to activists and government planners alike. While a good overview, […]