-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

Over the past year, a growing number of online platforms devoted to civic improvements have been launched in cities nationwide, many of them right here in New York. The Institute for Urban Design launched By the City / For the City, asking New Yorkers to generate ideas on how they want to improve the public realm, and then calling on designers to respond to these ideas [Note: By the City / For the City submissions are still being accepted, through July 14. -Ed.] for the forthcoming exhibition and catalogue Atlas of Possibility. This past May, we here at Urban Omnibus compiled Fifty Ideas for the New City, online and in poster form, and asked readers and visitors at the Festival of Ideas for the New City to suggest their own.

The City of New York has been inching toward a digital revolution for some time. In January, Mayor Bloomberg appointed Rachel Sterne, a 27-year old former web entrepreneur, as the City’s first Chief Digital Officer. Soon after, the City released its first-ever Road Map for the Digital City, which lays out a plan to provide more access to the web, improve connectivity, and embrace the growth and influence the web has had on business and personal interaction. And then there are specific web-based services, such as NYCService, a platform for connecting non-profits to volunteers, and 311 Online, the digitized version of citizen hotline 311.

Most recently, the City of New York announced a new digital platform for civic engagement: Change By Us NYC. This online forum is a place “to share ideas, create projects, discover resources and make our city better.” Created by media design firm Local Projects, Change by Us is an adaptation of their earlier project Give a Minute, which has been applied in Chicago and Memphis and is coming soon to San Jose, Philadelphia and Seattle. Change By Us allows users to input ideas by text message and on the website. Based on those ideas, people are directed to “project groups” which connect them with other visitors. By hosting both “‘ideas” and “‘projects,” the site is intended to foster a sense of community through team building and shared resources. The site aims to build a social network for civic engagement by connecting like-minded ideas, people and projects and directing those ideas toward government and non-profits who can make them happen.

Screengrab of nyc.changeby.us

Last December, we spoke to Jake Barton, founder and principal of Local Projects about the Give a Minute project. This week, we checked in with Barton again, and asked him a few questions about Change by Us NYC:

Urban Omnibus: Change by Us NYC is described as an “evolution” of your other successful civic platform Give a Minute, which was announced as a forthcoming NYC initiative by Mayor Bloomberg in January. How will the new platform be implemented differently?
Jake Barton: Give a Minute was a crowd-sourcing platform which allowed anyone to put in their ideas and have them reviewed by various City leaders, whether in government, not-for-profits or business. It was a really exciting way to get people to share their inspirations and innovations with each other and with the City. Change By Us is a platform for actualization. It moves New Yorkers from ideas to solutions, connecting them with projects that make their city better.

You have said: “Change By Us is a moment of transition when residents move from consumers to partners. It’s a way of reinventing public participation.” How will this digital platform increase transparency or connect individuals to organizations, city agencies or other people in any other way than has historically been the case?
Rather than look to the City as the singular provider, Change by Us allows New Yorkers to be partners in innovations and improvements, putting together ideas and initiatives on a local level that are connected to larger organizations like not-for-profits, businesses or government. It is a consolidated approach to improving the city that doesn’t segment between any type of organization, but focuses on the ideas that can make the city better.

How do you think Change By Us will work to effect change? What mechanisms are in place for ensuring that the ideas don’t just stay on the Internet?
Right now there are modest tools for actualization that focus on setting goals, and communicating between project members to achieve those goals. We’re looking to those who start projects to have the passion and tenacity to make their projects real by organizing and taking action. Like all social software, we also have community managers that are starting to go through the site to find projects and advise the project leaders.

How does Change by Us differ from 311 Online?
311 Online is really about access to general City resources, whereas apps like SeeClickFix are really about identifying specific problems for the City to fix. Change By Us is meant to be a platform that frames challenges and provides resources so that New Yorkers themselves can help solve them. The City has some official projects on the site, like the One Million Trees project, but that’s not what powers Change By Us. The New Yorker-led initiatives are at its heart.

How can users connect with the “Network of Listeners” to ensure that their ideas and suggestions are heard?
The goal is to get people who are submitting ideas to join a project and make it happen on their own, using the resources and tools that the site allows. If City leaders listen, and endorse and champion projects, that is just another way to encourage projects to become a reality.

Are you expanding Change By Us and/or Give A Minute to other cities?
We’re slated to launch in Seattle, Philadelphia and San Jose, but are interested in launching in any and every city around the world. By the end of the fall we will have some multi-lingual aspects implemented, as well as a variety of new project tools like video and photo sharing and more, to help us scale up. We’re hoping that Change By Us really is part of a paradigm shift inside cities that mirrors the participation we’re seeing in so many other institutions. We want the people to be able to grab hold and change their cities!

Screengrab from nyc.changeby.us

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT
The arrival of Change By Us into the digital playing field of civic engagement raises questions: what potential do digital platforms offer for actually improving our city’s public realm? Some of the greatest coalition building and community improvement projects have stemmed from small, citizen-led involvement from the ground-up. Will these platforms benefit small, active groups or offer anything that Facebook, Twitter or Google can’t already provide? More importantly, if decision-makers and proponents of change are thumbing through these ideas, how can we ensure that they adequately represent the needs of all of our citizens, not just a small group of privileged Internet users?

Digital platforms for civic engagement provide users with a diverse set of tools. Change by Us offers a way for people and groups to share best practices and engage with one another to implement change. In a partnership with non-profit Citizens Committee for NYC, Change by Us will offer micro-grants of $500 – $1,000 to community groups seeking to implement ideas shared on the site. Another partner is the online site, ioby, a riff on the Kickstarter model to offer environmental and neighborhood-based groups a platform for fundraising through multiple small donations.

Online platforms like Change by Us will continue to develop and, I hope, will add to the landscape of civic engagement that currently exists in a meaningful way. But it looks like it’s up to us to make sure it is more than just a digital suggestion box.

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Alicia Rouault is an Assistant Editor at Urban Omnibus. When away from the Omnibus desk, she spends her time working for the City of Newark’s Division of Planning and Economic Development assisting Waterfront Planner Damon Rich. She is currently a Masters Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the Pratt Institute with an interest in urban waterfronts, data visualization, community advocacy, graphic design, and mapping.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

New Community Data Features on OASIS
We are testing some new features on OASIS (the Open Accessible Space Information System), and we’re looking for feedback. We want to make OASIS more open and accessible (pun intended!) for our users. We think that it should be easier to add mapped data to OASIS, and we’d like to test the option of letting anyone add any data layer they want to OASIS (within reason) regardless of whether the mapped information is explicitly related to open space. This would go far to making OASIS a more meaningful community platform for mapping New York’s neighborhoods. This would offer the ease of use of existing platforms like Google Maps, combined with the richly layered mapped data that’s already a part of OASIS.

Some data sets might be small or temporary. For example: wouldn’t it be neat to overlay all of Prospect Park’s destination sites on OASIS’s maps, so you can view them with historical aerial photos? The Prospect Park Alliance website shows the destinations, but doesn’t have the rich detail that OASIS’s maps have.

Or perhaps adding the locations of “stalled development” sites in Brooklyn? City Councilmember Brad Lander’s website highlights these locations (see below), but not along with maps of land use patterns, other housing sites, legislative districts, and more that OASIS provides.

Screengrab from bradlander.com/stalleddevelopment

Other data sets might be fascinating but totally unrelated to parks and community gardens. For example: 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire that took the lives of almost 150 workers and provided a tragic but powerful rallying cry for the then-nascent labor movement. Researchers have mapped where each of the victims lived. But what if we could view these locations on OASIS, overlaying historical maps simultaneously with the current street grid, imagining what we might have seen 100 years ago as we walk to the subway along the same path that an immigrant worker in the Triangle factory strode along a century ago?

Last year, New York City was hit with a blizzard that caught city officials unprepared. The local public radio station (WNYC) mapped the locations of people who called in with reports of whether their streets were plowed or not. What if we could view these spots with maps (that we have on OASIS) of demographics, zoning, land use, schools, and transit?

With each of these examples, maybe some interesting geographic patterns would turn up, or maybe not. But at the very least it would be intriguing to open up OASIS as a platform for creating and analyzing visual correlations like these — and more. The sky’s the limit. The only thing holding us back — till now — was the technology.

Fusion Tables & OASIS
Last year Google developed a new service called Fusion Tables that could make this vision a reality. Fusion Tables enables you to quickly upload a list of items (like a spreadsheet) or create one from scratch, save it online, map it (if it includes location information), and share it with the world. The Center for Urban Research’s application architect David Burgoon was able to integrate the Fusion Tables service into OASIS.

Screengrab from oasisnyc.net

In order to test Fusion Tables with OASIS, we have added a “Community Data” tab to the right of the map and we have provided links to several data sets already in Fusion Tables so you can try it out. These are: Daffodil planting locations in 2011 from New Yorkers for Parks (the Daffodil Project is a living memorial to September 11, 2001); the locations of the Triangle shirtwaist fire victims; and waterfront access locations in New York and New Jersey. Eventually you’ll be able to add your own data from Fusion Tables (or any table that’s already been created in Fusion Tables), simply by typing the table ID number in a text entry box on the OASIS map page.

If you’re familiar with Fusion Tables, you know that there are many options you can configure. While we’re testing how this new feature works with OASIS, keep the following things in mind if you’d like to suggest Fusion Tables data we should add: Visibility of your data table must be public or unlisted; it must be exportable; it needs to be point data; and it has to have a location column.

Community Map Layers
We’re also testing a feature that’s somewhat more labor intensive, but nonetheless powerful. And it doesn’t have the limitations of Fusion Tables, in that it can be any type of geographic feature, not just “point” locations. Scroll down the Legend tab in OASIS, and you’ll now see a section called “Community Maps (beta).” For now, this only includes one layer (described below). But think of it as a placeholder for other types of information that you think would be useful as part of OASIS’s maps.

Community Maps Test Layer

The map layer we’ve added as a test case shows the areas in western Queens that were impacted by a power blackout in July 2006. For weeks that summer, tens of thousands of residents and businesses were without electricity. Though power was eventually restored, people were justifiably upset and took legal action against Con Ed. The utility eventually entered into an agreement with these groups to provide almost $8 million to invest in energy-efficiency and environmental projects in the Western Queens community affected by the power outage. The NY State Public Service Commission selected a local foundation, the North Star Fund, to administer this project because of the Fund’s expertise in facilitating community led grantmaking processes.

Although the Fund, with Con Ed’s help, has mapped the affected areas and the groups receiving funds, OASIS is supplementing this effort. We’ve added the affected areas map to the OASIS site, making it easy for people involved in the program to easily see which properties are inside or outside the affected areas, what community assets (such as community gardens and schools) are located in the area, and what elected officials represent the areas.

Next Steps
The Community Maps section of OASIS enables us to add maps that may be short-term, focused on specific locations, or change regularly as local needs change or issues evolve.

What are your thoughts? What criteria do you think we should use to add map layers? How much value does this bring to local community organizations? (compared with something like Google Maps, for example.) Should we add layers to this section indefinitely, or only use this to display time-limited information? What Fusion Tables data would you like to see added? We are eager to hear from you. Email your feedback to oasisnyc@gc.cuny.edu.

This is an abbreviated version of a post published on the OASIS wiki, where you can find further information and instructions on testing these new community features.

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Steven Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center. His 25-year career has centered around accessing, understanding, analyzing, and publicizing data for public policy development, community planning, and research purposes. He lives in Manhattan.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Buttons | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

This weekend marked the convergence of transit gurus, software developers, and private and public service experts for the inaugural TransportationCamp, a weekend-long “unconference” presented by OpenPlans with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. The event — featuring group tours of transportation facilities, talks from industry leaders, and self-propelled discussion sessions — aimed to unite transit professionals and self-proclaimed technophiles to facilitate dialogue between the two parties in an attempt to improve transit systems through technology.

A brief note on the concept of the “unconference”: these are informal, highly flexible forums, facilitating often spontaneous topic discussions that stand in stark contrast to the comparatively staid world of conventional conferences. Like a traditional conference, TransportationCamp featured scheduled talks with an impressive array of industry leaders (Chris Vein, the White House’s new Deputy CTO for Government innovation, gave a particularly fascinating talk on the role of technology in the renewal of government). But unlike a traditional conference, session topics are proposed by attendees, drawn up on oversized post-it notes, and integrated into a master schedule. Compelling session post-its tend to garner the most attention and attendance, with sessions ranging from casual roundtables to Q&A discussions to abbreviated presentations.

Session board | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

This rather democratic structure yields a vast array of session topics – from a discussion exploring fare payment systems facilitated by MTA reps, to a Taxi App Pageant featuring brief presentations from developer start-ups followed by a Q&A session with Ashwini Chhabra, of NYC’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. These sessions were all lively with active engagement from attendees. The problem with such a conference – indeed, any conference – lies in the insularity of its subject matter and the homogeneity of its constituents. While coming from a broad range of organizations and backgrounds, attendees represent a very specific demographic (relatively well-educated and affluent) that can be disconnected from end-users of both the transit technologies being developed and of public transit itself.

A striking example of this disconnect was apparent during the taxi pageant. Here, app developers pitched their wares – Cabulous, TaxiMagic, FareShare, CabCorner and Weeels [click here to read Weeels' Urban Omnibus feature -ed.] were all represented — most of which aim to promote ridesharing in urban areas. Apps locate and match users based on their GPS coordinates and common destinations, helping both to reduce fares for riders and to ensure cabs are occupied as often as possible. This is a great idea, which explains why so many start-ups are chasing the concept. But while the app may seem entirely useful, few have experienced any success in terms of actually matching users. This failure was squarely attributed to a lack of volume, the inability to achieve critical mass. Without enough app users, it becomes impossible to make successful matches.

A discussion after the session, however, indicated larger problems in this transit initiative. ”They didn’t really account for the fact that many people won’t share cabs for social reasons – namely safety,” noted Manasvi Menon, a consultant at the transportation and infrastructure firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. Once we examine the app’s utility from beyond the perspective of someone immersed in transit or technology, issues of safety – or the perception of it — make a cab share program matching users based on GPS coordinates problematic. To address these issues, TransportationCamp may need to broaden its audience beyond transit and technology circles.

Session board in use | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

Transportation-Camp’s greatest success is its ability to respond rapidly to its own internal patterns or deficits.A similar disconnect was visible early in the day during a talk from Charles Monheim, C.O.O. of the MTA. Monheim, who dubbed himself a “car-free New Yorker” to scattered applause, extolled the recent improvement the MTA was making to the system beyond “bricks and mortar,” namely soft technological infrastructure in the manner of smartphone apps.

Since making its data sets available to app developers, the MTA has seen the proliferation of apps bearing its name, all helping to make the system more user friendly, aiding in navigation, decreasing wait times, and making public mobility in the city more efficient. But while Monheim lauded this “21st century philanthropy,” he failed to address who was left out of the new phenomenon. In a room filled to capacity with transit professionals and software engineers, it’s easy to forget that not everyone has an iPhone. Despite the enormous push to develop apps aimed at improving public mobility, those without access to smartphones, largely the city’s less affluent, are excluded from the app bonanza currently underway.

Fortunately, the beauty of an unconference, and perhaps TransportationCamp’s greatest success, is its ability to respond rapidly to its own internal patterns or deficits by adding another dimension to the discussion over the course of the weekend.

While the question of transit equity went largely unanswered in the sessions attended Saturday, upon returning for the Sunday schedule, one session post-it caught my eye. Rosa Parks: Is there an app for that?, facilitated by Benjamin de la Peña of the Rockefeller Foundation, unpacked the notions of transportation equity in New York City, and explored not only how technology could be used to create a more efficient transportation system, but also how it could “bring attention to the structural injustices” that exist within such a system.

In this session, filled to capacity, like-minded attendees discussed the absence of serious discussion of the digital divide from many of the weekend’s sessions (Monheim’s oversight had not gone unnoticed) and data necessary to visualize inequality in the transit sector. The ability to illustrate transit deserts and other accessibility issues, for example, could be used to help improve underserved districts.

Like all sessions, de la Peña’s was limited to 45 minutes, but the nature of the discussion propelled further discussion and connection over lunch and the remainder of the day – the real goal of any conference.

While TransportationCamp may have occasionally fallen victim to the weaknesses that haunt conventional conferences, the event succeeds in its flexibility and responsiveness. Rosa Parks: Is there an app for that? was coordinated on the fly, and responded directly to a void felt by participants during the weekend – impossible in the world of the conventional conference.

But an unmitigated success still demands the format push conventions even further. Unconferences proudly differentiate themselves in terms of their informality and flexibility, so TransportationCamp would be wise to use these traits to bring a broader array of stakeholders to the table. End-users of ridesharing apps, and indeed, their smartphone-less counterparts, surely have a contribution to be made to the transit puzzle. Inviting them to the table may facilitate more comprehensive solutions to existing transit issues.

Post-conference reception | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

Next weekend, TransportationCamp is headed to the West Coast for TransportationCamp West in San Francisco. Register here. And if anyone wants to recap it for Urban Omnibus, let us know here.

Mat Triebner is a freelance urban strategist, designer, and co-founder of Scout Ltd., a UK-based spatial consultancy promoting creative reuse of vacant lots. He lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

And building a movement is exactly what Carol Coletta, president of urban advocacy non-profit CEOs for Cities, and Jake Barton, principal of the media design firm Local Projects, set out to do when they came up with this idea. This week in Chicago, CEOs for Cities is convening what it calls a “Challenge Event” where it will be discussing its ambition for everyone in the city to get where he or she needs to go without owning a car. To that end, for the past few weeks Chicagoans have been asked, through ads in subways, buses and newspapers, “What would encourage you to walk, bike and take CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) more often?” Read on to learn about how Carol and Jake came up with this idea, and what they plan to do with it next. And get ready for when Give a Minute hits New York next year. -C.S.

The Give a Minute interface. Click image to launch giveaminute.info.

What is Give a Minute?

Jake Barton: Give a Minute is a new way to create public participation and conversation at a citywide scale. It allows for the asking of a question (or questions) to an entire city simultaneously. Instead of looking at the way cities work as a sort of zero-sum game of limited and finite resources, Give a Minute seeks to identify and then deploy questions around shared priorities; questions that tap into the interests of the general population as well as those of different city leaders and organizations that might be able to put changes into practice.

Carol Coletta: Nobody thinks that public engagement works very well in America. You can certainly see from trends in voting and other indicators that we have opted out from public life in many ways. Public life in a democracy shouldn’t be so painful and depressing that you would rather watch Dancing with the Stars than make your voice heard. And a lot of elected officials would rather slit their wrists than attend a community meeting.

So we started to ask ourselves, can we do it differently? Can we imagine community engagement in which people are not just checking a box, but really engaging? When I became familiar with the work of Local Projects, I approached Jake and said, “Hey, I have a project for you. How would like to help reinvent public life in America?” And he said, “Okay.”

“For most people, public meetings try your patience; they are hostile and certainly no fun. Give a Minute is an attempt to make participation fun.” –Carol Coletta | Photos by Chris Schneider.

Jake Barton: The question Carol was really asking was “How do you redefine public participation in the 21st century?” And the solution involved using existing technologies to facilitate a conversation and focusing or structuring that dialogue in a constructive way.

As they exist now, most contemporary forms of participatory activity in the public sphere invite critique: if you put forward a plan and put a microphone in front of it, people are going to critique it. And, because community meetings happen in physical space in a very restrictive amount of time, the only people who go are those who already care about the issue at hand, who have the time and disposition to make their voices heard, or the people who are most polarized on either side of the debate. For Give A Minute, we wanted to lower the barriers for entry into constructive dialogue focused around positive collective change rather than specific complaints.

The project emerged from a series of challenges that CEOs for Cities has issued to specific cities – including Detroit, Indianapolis, Memphis, Grand Rapids and others – across the nation as part of their US Initiative.

Carol Coletta: Which is a national initiative that imagines opportunity, community, connectivity, livability and optimism as best achieved through good urbanism. It came out of frustration that a lot of things aren’t working. We can’t continue to drive as much as we do, consume as much as we do, under-educate ourselves as much as we do, vote as little as we do – essentially ignore the public realm as much as we do.

Creating Cities that are of, by and for US from CEOs for Cities on Vimeo.

We want to make a different future compelling so that people will move forward to meet it, not because they are scared of today but because they are excited by a shared vision for tomorrow.

We’ve come up with what we call the Declaration of Interdependence, which articulates some of the values we would like our shared urban future to uphold. For example, on the topic of connectivity, we want a future in which we can realistically say: “We can go where we need to go without owning a car.” On the topic of community, we want a future in which we can say: “We can engage in a robust public life.”

Jake Barton: Our first Give a Minute question in Chicago was related to CEOs for Cities’ “connectivity challenge.” The question we wanted to ask was, “How can we get you where you are going without driving a car?” But, in an effort to engage as much of the general populace of the city as possible, a lot of work went into figuring out how best to ask that question. The final phrasing is: “Hey Chicago, what would encourage you to walk, bike or take CTA more often?” Chicago is serving as our test case for the platform as we work on expanding the project to other cities. When we launch Give a Minute in New York City next year, we hope to address sustainability in some way. We’re talking to the city government about what questions might be most useful.

But before we came up with the platform, we started with a lot of ethnography, a lot of observation of existing systems on different scales. From the beginning, we had a sense that we wanted our system to be based on mobile apps, texting and websites, so that it could feel as open and universal as possible. It is clear that, of all the communication technologies available at this point, texting has the most penetration.

An early prototype for the Give a Minute interface

We also spent a lot of time working on how to motivate people to participate. The idea that we landed on was to reinforce that people’s answers are valued by attaching the questions to what we are calling “response leaders.” The response leaders are a way to make clear that the project was about dialogue – if there is someone specific asking the question, and reading the answers, members of the public will be more likely to respond. The response leaders that we have in Chicago are the head of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), the head of a bicycling advocacy group and the head a private company that builds bicycling accessories. The idea is that by texting or using the mobile app or website to answer the question, you are not just communicating with government alone, but with a coalition of leaders from private, public and non-profit sectors. It’s collective action combined with conversation with specific individuals.

Some responses to the question, "Hey Chicago, what would encourage you to walk, bike or take CTA more often?"

So, specific leaders are asking the questions and citizens are sharing their ideas, but to what extent are subsequent actions designed into the process?

The satisfaction of simply being asked isn’t going to last for a very long time if nothing ever changes. But, on the other hand, once I’m asked – as someone who is not a transit expert but who does ride the CTA every day – once I’m asked to share an idea about what would get me to walk, bike or take public transportation more often, then I’m going to start thinking about how the conditions for walking, biking or transit ridership could be better. And once I start thinking like that, I’m going to ask, “Why isn’t that on the agenda? Are we talking about it? How do I make sure we are talking about it?”

The simple notion that Give a Minute has opened up a way for me to express my personal feelings and ideas without having to look up the CTA’s phone number or email address or trying to figure out who in the world might be listening; the fact that I send in an idea and get an instant response and a thank you – these little things make a big difference in changing the perception of public participation.

Jake Barton: The system is a space to get users of city services to make their voices heard. We want to make a hierarchy and database out of the input, but any actions that ultimately result from that feedback require another, deeper step. So I think it will be on a city-by-city case. We have plans to create proof points around the system itself, so when people text something they get an actual response from someone who is paying attention. Based on our work in Chicago, I think the cities understand what’s required to make the system feel functional and responsive and that will be built into future partnerships.

Our hope is that people, whether groups of citizen responders or city agencies or other kinds of coalitions, will be able to create actions out of the answers themselves. Essentially, Give a Minute can bring together a bright idea, a group of people that can make that happen, a group that feels passionately about this concern, and a group that can be deployed when and if we are trying to rally support for x, y or z issue.

How does Give a Minute work in practice?

Jake Barton: In Chicago we had ads in the Chicago Tribune, around 500 donated ads from the CTA running on buses and trains, and then just word of mouth. People can also choose to post their answer to their Facebook or Twitter status, which helps their friends hear about the project.

In the current, beta version, the website simply groups the answers chronologically. Going forward, we will group them by common interests. For example, in the case of the Chicago question, we can group all the biking people together and then within that group we can have a sub-group for bike lane advocates, bike safety advocates, etc. That allows us to message those sub-groups directly to help turn common interests into actions.

A Give a Minute poster in the Chicago public transit system | Courtesy of Local Projects

Carol Coletta: Identifying these interest groups will allow users to go find other people with shared priorities and get together to do things that don’t necessarily need government intervention.

Jake Barton: Some ideas that may be floated through Give a Minute recommend government action – like, we should build a light rail, or pay more attention to places open after midnight. Other kinds of answers – like, we should make a pocket park in my neighborhood, or there’s this vacant lot we should make into something cool, or we should start a walking group in my neighborhood – are exactly the type of things that groups of private citizens can take on. For actions that can be addressed by citizens meeting in physical space, we’ve talked about kicking out some of the next steps to meetup.com (if the next step is getting strangers to meet in physical space) or Kickstarter (if the next step is micro-fundraising to help start a pocket park, for example).

Give a Minute aspires to be the kind of system that can support both of those types of answers – those that require government action and those that can lead to self-organized action – simultaneously. Because, right now, all the existing crowdsourcing platforms take a big picture approach and a lot of cities don’t have the funds or political will to work like that.

A lot of current technologies that are working now on city-scale questions are all based on a pyramid structure, where it is presumed that there is one golden idea that should rise to the top. Give a Minute works differently: it’s not about sourcing ideas that haven’t been floated before, it’s a matter of building enough momentum and political will to actually implement change.

So it’s as much about movement building as sourcing information and ideas?

Jake Barton: Exactly. It is using the sourced information to hopefully build a movement – that was the idea.

Carol Coletta: It is legitimately both. Simply asking people in Chicago about what would make them walk, bike or take transit more often will, we think, encourage them to walk, bike and take transit more often. It really is that obvious.

Testing the idea in physical space | Courtesy of Local Projects

How will you measure success?

Jake Barton: Of course, one goal has always been to make participation as easy as possible, so we have multiple platforms and we like to capture people anywhere that we can – texting when you’re bored on the subway, or participating through Facebook or Twitter when you see your friends doing the same. But the trick is to make sure that the questions are both compelling and make sense but also that they have a productive aspect to them. You can ask dumb questions and get a ton of participation, but we want to ask the best questions possible that will actually spur people to participate.

I think one measure of success would be if Give a Minute could actually produce enough political capital to help cities make changes. We don’t have one specific approach that we are pushing as a metric of success. This is an experiment to try to help cities create a more qualitatively successful approach themselves.

Carol Coletta: We recognize that we are still dancing in the dark a bit. This is the first of what will surely be many iterations of the project, so we are out there learning. But ultimately, our goal is to reinvent public engagement in ways that are more suited to contemporary democracy. Without a robust public life, democracy suffers, our cities suffer and we suffer. So, call me ambitious, but that’s what success looks like for me.

SUMMIT FOR NYC
The Summit for New York City is the Municipal Art Society’s “first conference devoted to New York’s livability, examining the challenges the city faces in its seemingly contradictory roles as a growing global capital and as a city of unique neighborhoods.” Under that broad rubric of livability, session topics include When Art Builds Community, People Behind the Screens, Reclaiming the Public Realm, and Vibrant Neighborhoods, with a more focused analysis of the the future of the Garment District the Far West Side through the lens of the Moynihan Station project (all this on the heels of the recent would-have-been 100th birthday of McKim, Mead, and White’s original Penn Station). The Summit will take place on October 21st and 22nd at Penn Plaza Pavilion.

CALLING ALL CODERS
The City of New York is hosting its second competition for web and mobile applications, NYC BigApps 2.0, to “increase government transparency and provide greater public access to city data.” Developers are invited to mine 350 data sets from NYC DataMine as the basis for apps that deliver information about various aspects of the city, ranging from education to transport, in a clear and creative manner. The organizers hope that the competition will help to provide “talented entrepreneurs with the tools to create new products. “We encourage the development of applications that can then be commercialized, spurring job growth and economic development in New York City,” says Deputy Mayor Steele in the competition press release. The submission period lasts through January 12 and winners will be announced in March. Get inspired to participate by browsing through the app gallery of last year’s winners — or by the $20,000 in cash prizes to be awarded this time around.

ARC REVISITED
After public uproar about last week’s controversial “killing” of the ARC (Access to the Region’s Core) Tunnel, due to a continual increase in budget expectations, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie agreed to take a second look at proposals for the project. But his promise is to reconsider, not to move forward. The New Jersey Star Ledger describes the re-evaluation process as a standoff between the Governor and the US Federal Government in which “neither…seems to have blinked.”  There is a two-week period in which the proposals will be considered, so stay tuned…

IAC MAPPING

Amazing Building Mapping – Vimeo Festival from Dan Ilic on Vimeo.

If you happened to be in Chelsea on Saturday night, you may have noticed something different about Frank Gehry’s IAC Building. British arts and technology collective Seeper orchestrated an impressive digital mapping projection for the Vimeo Festival and Awards. Evan Grant, the founder of Seeper, noted the particular challenges of the “flowing curves, different geometries and different depths” of the site in a video a few days before the event, naming the IAC building as “the most challenging” of all past projects. Their stated goal was to “create a sense of wonderment,” and if the sounds of the crowd are any indication, it seems like they succeeded.

TIDAL POWER
After the announcement of a $1 million grant from the Department of Energy to the University of Maine for continuing tidal power research, WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show hosted Paul Jacobson, Ocean Energy Leader for EPRI, and Michael Peterson, leader of UM’s Tidal Power Initiative. The interview provides a lot of information about the specifics of tidal power efforts, including optimal site placement, environmental impact, technological issues, and fantasies for the future. Jacobsen states that “global estimates range from 11 GW to 400 GW of annual average power available to be extracted… and it doesn’t pollute.”

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The notion of multi-family housing in New York brings to mind unromantic concepts like density, (un)affordability or noisy neighbors. But maybe there are some simple ways to re-enchant the idea of dense urban living. This week’s feature offers one such strategy: identifying, mapping and analyzing those residential buildings that have proper names. 150 years ago, a residential structure for more than one family meant tenement, plain and simple. And in order to convince residents that sharing a roof and some walls with unrelated neighbors didn’t have to confer a social stigma, property developers had to do some marketing, 19th Century style. The practice of naming buildings is still in effect, but remains subordinate to the more homogenizing numerical identifiers of address or grid. Help tektonomasticians Haruka Horiuchi and Frank Hebbert put a more personal face on New York’s building stock by adding a building to their citywide map of named buildings. Here, the two of them describe what they are up to with this project in advance of their psychogeographic tour of the named buildings of the East Village and this weekend’s Conflux Festival. Read more below, join them this weekend, and contribute to their growing database. -C.S.

Tektonomastics: The Building Names Project is a collaborative effort to map the named residential buildings of New York City and beyond. But first, what does tektonomastics mean anyway?

“Tektonomastics” is a made-up word, combining “tekto-” — Greek for “building” — with “onomastics” — the study of the history and origin of proper names. More established branches of onomatology include toponomastics (the study of place names) and anthroponomastics (the study of personal names). We are starting a new branch — tektonomastics — or, the study of building names.

Launcelot and Elaine, neighboring buildings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn named after star-crossed lovers. For those not familiar with the story, Elaine loved Launcelot (usually spelled “Lancelot”) her whole life - even though Launcelot was devoted to King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. Eventually Elaine died of heartbreak, but here on Eastern Parkway, someone has thoughtfully restored her lover to her side once more. The two buildings were built almost 100 years apart: Launcelot was added 2006, Elaine was built in 1908.

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After moving to New York, we began to notice intriguing names on residential buildings around our neighborhood in Brooklyn. A lot of the names refer to notable people (Martha Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln), while others are typical “nice place” names (Majestic Court, Park Central, The Lakeview). But some are just downright quirky (Mattowacks, possibly a long-forgotten name for Long Island), and others are more enigmatic and poetic (Ada, Launcelot, Lillianette). Why did someone chose those particular names for buildings? Why don’t we call them by their proper names anymore? Was there a time when friends said, “Let’s meet at the Martinique at 6”? Or lovers wrote letters addressed to their sweethearts at Monbijou on East 17th Street?
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Meet me at Monbijou? Or Patrician Court?

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We began noticing named buildings everywhere — in Astoria, Inwood, Chelsea, and more — and realized that they exist all over New York City. These eclectic monikers evoke a bygone era when owners, builders and designers identified their buildings with personality and humor.
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A taxonomy of building names in the tektonomastics database

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Our own collection of photos of these buildings grew — but the city remains so vast. Enter the crowd: the map and building inventory are online, at tektonomastics.org, where anyone can put named buildings on the map. By taking photographs and plotting the locations of these buildings, we are creating a map of this forgotten landscape and helping these neglected titles live once more. Is there a named building on your block? If so, click here to add it to the map.
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The Building Names Inventory from tektonomastics.org

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So, what qualifies as a named building?

1. The building name should be architecturally integrated. The name must be visible and the physical sign declaring the building’s name must be part of the building itself, not simply added on as an afterthought. For the most part, this means that the name will be carved into stone, or be made of wooden or metal letters that are attached to the building. Printed names on canopies and overhangs, decals attached to glass, or recently added marketing signs don’t count; names that reflect permanent identity are interesting, not those that can be changed on a whim.

2. The building should be primarily residential. Public buildings, institutions, hotels, etc. are usually already known by their given names. We are looking to learn the names of more modest buildings — buildings that would normally only be known to residents and neighbors. Besides, sometimes the most humble and ordinary buildings have the quirkiest names.
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A group of buildings with female names

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The inventory now stands at 125, growing in spurts since May, with contributions from a dozen or so spotters. Each named building in the inventory is geo-located on a map, and photographs of each building are stored on the Tektonomastics Flickr page. By hand, we add more information from the Department of Buildings where available, including neighborhood, year of construction, number of units, zoning, and more. By storing all of the locations and information in a database online, we can easily generate live-updated charts and maps; a full selection of up-to-date building stats can always be viewed on the data page of the Tektonomastics website.
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What have we learned about the named buildings of New York City? Most are in Crown Heights and nearby neighborhoods, but this reflects our geographic bias, rather than a representative picture of where these buildings exist city-wide — or does it? Until all neighborhoods are canvased, we won’t know where the greatest concentration lies.
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Preliminary geographic distribution of named buildings

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Why do these buildings have names? It seems that names were central to demonstrating the respectability of apartments as a new type of middle class dwelling. First advocated to American architects by Calvert Vaux in 1857, “French flats” were put forth as the ideal solution for an affordable and respectable form of dwelling for the urban middle class, better than a tenement but more affordable than a single family house. What better way to demonstrate this respectability than with a solid, English name like the Cambridge or the Oxford?

The very first middle class multifamily residence in New York City was named Stuyvesant Apartments. Commissioned by Rutherford Stuyvesant, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, and completed in 1869, this ur-type of multifamily living was directly inspired by the “French flat.” Though it’s unclear if the name Stuyvesant Apartments was actually carved over the entryway, the naming itself set a precedent for the slew of new apartment buildings that followed. The peak era of buildings in the inventory seems to be the ’20s.

As apartment buildings became more familiar, names helped give distinction and helped with the rental of units. If your street address wasn’t notable, the name could be. Some of these early building names were simply after their owner (like the Stuyvesant Apartments), but others were eclectic: The Knickerbocker, the Spanish flats, the Rembrandt, the Dakota, the Albany. Some of these early named buildings have since been demolished, but the names collected by this project so far display a similar diversity.
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Buildings in the Tektonomastics database by year constructed

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In 1984, Thomas Norton and Jerry Patterson published a guide to the named buildings of Manhattan (we discovered it some months after starting the map, and have so far resisted the temptation to cross-check results). They write: “The names of Manhattan’s apartment buildings, like the city itself, are inconsistent, surprising, and sometimes enigmatic.” Their guide contains nearly two thousand buildings in that borough alone, so we have some work to do. Join us on this unusual urban treasure hunt, anytime, at tektonomastics.org. Or, next weekend, as part of the Conflux Festival, you can become a tektonomatologist for the day, as we try to locate and research every named building in the East Village. Meet you at Monbijou?

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Further reading on the history of multifamily housing in New York City:

A History of Housing in New York City (Columbia University Press: 1990) by Richard Plunz

Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Cornell University Press: 1990) by Elizabeth Collins Cromley

Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History (Dover Press: 1992) by Andrew Alpern

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Haruka Horiuchi and Frank Hebbert are Holobiont, half architect, half urban planner. When not mapping the named buildings of New York City, they’re building the Super Table, an activation device for unused storefronts, and painting chalkboard neighborhood maps on stopped construction sites.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

What is Code For America, and how did you come up with the idea?
I had been the chair of the Web 2.0 Expos and had recently started working on a new event designed to bring the principles and values of the web to government, now called the Gov 2.0 Summit. We knew that there was a unique opportunity with the new administration taking hold in DC to advocate for a new way of doing things in the White House and federal agencies, looking at the web as a platform and leveraging some of the dynamics we see on the consumer web to make government more efficient and effective. In the midst of trying to sort out how we could be helpful at the federal level, I started hearing from an old friend who is the chief of staff for the mayor of Tucson, AZ, Andrew Greenhill. Andrew had an idea that where we could be most helpful initially, and where we were really needed, was in cities. Most American cities are experiencing significant financial crises; it’s a situation with pretty dire consequences to the citizens of the United States that doesn’t get enough media attention. Many cities are responding by cutting back services, but if you look under the hood, there are inefficiencies, clunky bureaucracies, and decades-old ways of doing things that should be re-worked before services are cut. Andrew had some ideas for web applications that he’d like to have built for Tucson that he thought would make the city work better, and wanted my help finding a group of talented developers from my community, the Web 2.0 community, who would help build them. The problem is, you can’t build these kind of applications through the normal technology procurement model that almost all cities use. We wrung our hands about this problem for several months until we were sitting around one day last summer, talking about Andrew’s experience in the Teach for America corps, and it occurred to me that we needed a Teach for America for the web industry. That was the spark for Code for America.

How would you define Gov 2.0 for someone who has never heard the term?
Many people think of Gov 2.0 as social media in government, but I subscribe to Tim O’Reilly’s view that we are talking about a more fundamental shift in how we frame the role of government. To borrow Tim’s (and Donald Kettl’s) metaphor, we’ve come to think of government as a vending machine, into which we put our taxes and out of which we get services. The problem is that there are an endless number of services citizens may need, and we’ve developed monumentally large bureaucracies in order to provide these services, causing huge inefficiencies. If we start to see government instead as a vehicle for collective action, a platform for society to do collectively what citizens can’t do individually, its role shifts from service provider to enabler. There will still be many services government must perform. But it should start looking at how it can do things like publish public data that allow the private sector to create applications that make citizens lives easier and connect citizens with common goals to each other to solve their own problems. The technologies that have changed our lives most dramatically in the last decade have been platforms: think Facebook or the iPhone. Neither tried to provide everything a consumer would need, but rather made it possible for developers to create applications and for the market to determine what was most valuable. Platform thinking is one critical skill for government to borrow from the consumer web; agility, citizen-centered design, and transparency are others.

How are the specific projects for each city determined?
We asked each city that applied to the program to suggest a web app that would make their city more transparent, efficient, and responsive to citizens, and one that could be reused by other cities afterwards. We loved the thinking they showed in this exercise, and we are now working with our five cities (Boston, DC, Seattle, Boulder, and Philadelphia) to refine those ideas, get them within the scope of our program, and clarify the proposed return on investment to the cities. We go through a brainstorm process with the cities in the late summer and early fall that brings in top thinkers from the Internet industry to bang around on the cities problems and proposed solutions, and we use this thinking to settle on more concrete projects for our fellows in the late fall/early winter.

What do you think are the most pressing issues facing American cities today?
One major issue that gets little attention is the demographics of the municipal workforce. In the seventies, over 70% of the local government workers were under 40. Today, less than 13% are. In many municipalities, 60% of the people who work in your city hall will retire in the next five years. Who replaces those workers (and many will not be replaced due to budget cuts) will determine whether cities use this fiscal crisis to reinvent themselves, or whether they pursue one of the other perceived options before them, including privatization, Chapter 9, or simply continuing to reduce services to the point where the city government is irrelevant. We have the opportunity right now to drive talented young people into public service; the Center for American Progress has found that the Millennials have the most positive view of government in several generations, and Pew has put out a study showing that this generation is the most open to helping others as well. But we have to make it culturally okay for smart, ambitious, tech-savvy people to take government jobs so they can drive change from the inside. The Obama administration helped with that agenda by hiring some great people from the technology industry, and by having two incredibly charismatic people in the top technology roles in the White House (Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra). We need to follow that up with concrete opportunities for young people not only to make a difference, but to get exposure to the needs of government and the opportunities to make your mark in the public sector.

Tied to that demographic crisis is a crisis of trust. City government officials feel constantly beat up by the different interest groups and individual citizens who feel that their needs are not being met. Average citizens feel disoriented and disconnected from city governments, unable to have a voice and frustrated when they need to actually get something done with City Hall. Citizens today, especially young ones who use social media to express themselves, take for granted having a voice, transacting with institutions almost frictionlessly, and finding communities of interest. City governments should enable all these experiences, but because most have failed to innovate, they speak a different language than the language of their citizens. As citizens, we need to require more of City Hall, but not in the sense of more programs that cost more money. We need to get in there and change the culture and the modes of communication first, and remake City Hall so it acts more like the citizens of the city it serves.

How do you think city governments should go about addressing some of these issues?
Well, unsurprisingly, I think city governments should be seeking out programs like Code for America and others like ours (City Hall Fellows is another great one) that bring new thinking into their organizations. They should look at making all the data they collect public through an open data initiative that encourages developers to write applications that make that data available to citizens in dozens of useful ways (see openmuni.org for how). They should prioritize programs that make interfacing with the city easier for citizens, like 311 centers and online service portals, and use open standards like the Open311API so that developers can have an impact with that data, too. They should consider implementing Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) policies that will make their organizations more competitive for technology talent. They should figure out how to move from broadcast and transactional communications to many-to-many communications that connect citizens with the city and with each other. This is an area where Code for America can really help.

How can “the next generation of Gov 2.0 apps for city governments” help address some of these issues?
Cities perform most functions in a very industrial age model. The next generation of Gov 2.0 apps can help them work in a network model, and find efficiencies and build trust with citizens by doing so. To take a few very small examples, cities currently answer questions from citizens in person and by phone and email. So they answer the same questions over and over again. In a network model, those questions are exposed to each other, not just in a knowledge database, but in a social context, so that citizens can not only learn from each other’s experiences, but also build on them, and get the answers they need instead of a canned, bureaucratic answer that doesn’t help them. Some of the staff answering those questions can be redeployed fixing other problems. Another small example is service requests. In most cities, if you call in to report a broken streetlight, your request goes into a (very long) queue of other requests, and eventually a city employee will be sent out to the location to inspect the streetlight, verify the location and note more information about the damage. If another call comes in about the same streetlight, it simply goes into the queue as well; we don’t know that it’s the same issue, reported twice. Eventually, a crew will be sent out to fix it. But there are network elements missing in that process. Citizens with camera-enabled smart phones are everywhere now; we can make it easy for them to take picture of service requests, and upload them with geo-tagging. There’s far more information in even one of those reports than in a phone call, but the real help is when you look at the data in aggregate and you realize that you have a) all the information that the city needs to fix the streetlight without sending out an inspector and b) the beginnings of a way of prioritizing these requests, because some issues will have more requests than others. Reading the collective intelligence means that you can cut out a step of the process, and you can get the most urgent requests fixed first. Are there issues to be grappled with in both these examples? Definitely. We have to think deeply about citizen privacy and digital divide issues if these are going to work and reflect our values. But that’s a challenge we have to rise to.

How big of a shift is necessary for city governments nationwide to realize the potential of these types of technologies?
Pretty big. But the way to change broadly is to get some early adopters who have the will to experiment, find some successes, and spread their stories. If you show city officials that others have tried and been successful in certain areas, it gives them the political will to make change.

What happens when fellows leave their post after the year? How will the culture of innovation Code for America supports be maintained in the long-term?
We’re designing the program to allow for a lot of interaction between the Fellows and municipal employees. We also hope that some of the Code for America alumni will either go on to careers in City Hall or start businesses that serve municipal IT. There is the nature of the applications we build as well. Gov 2.0 applications require not just technical maintenance, but also community managers. If we can bring a culture of community management through technology into City Hall, we will have made a difference.

Illustrations by Jane Kelly and Sam Silver.