It seems that every day the word ‘platform’ becomes more ingrained in the way we think about online tools to do good and address public problems. The ubiquity of the term may be due to its fundamental ambiguity, which it shares with other terms like ‘sustainability’ and ‘participation.’ In an incisive article on the subject […]
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Announcement Planning & Technology Conference
I’m helping plan this conference at MIT in April. We opened registration and announced the call for papers today. REGISTRATION INFORMATION & CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS AND PAPERS PLANNINGTECH@DUSP 2011 Friday, April 8, 2011 11:30 AM – 6:00 PM Location: MIT Building 9 DESCRIPTION New technologies are transforming how we communicate, expanding access to data and […]
Public Sector Innovation: Learning From History
At a conference attended in December on the “Future of the Crowdsourced City” a major topic of discussion was how city governments — or other city organizations — could embrace new technologies. Although nearly 20 years old, I thought this article was remarkably relevant for debates today about how to foster technology-enabled innovation in local […]
Which Crowdsourcing?
I wrote this article for the most recent APA Technology Division Newsletter, which we sent out this week. Other articles include city apps, water quality mapping, TOD database, a VMT estimation tool, and online participation. The expansion of the Internet has made possible amazing examples of the collaboration of large groups of people, a phenomenon […]
Zoning Conflict Heats Up In Cambridge
Exiting the Trader Joe’s near my home in Cambridge recently, I was approached by an intense man who asked: “Are you a registered voter in Cambridge?” He was collecting signatures for a petition that would put a recent zoning amendment adopted by the City Council on the ballot for a referendum. The City Council was […]
Public Sector Crowdsourcing: What’s Possible?
Lately I’ve been involved in a lot of conversations about crowdsourcing in the public sector. Although they’re sometimes confused, in general I think there are two types we can talk about: crowdsourcing policy (or ideas) and public goods (tangible work or services). This is a topic included in my Open Government Strategy for the City […]