At the recent Technology for Participatory Planning workshop, one of the suggestions for follow-up was to look back at a completed planning process, map it out step-by-step, and find places where inserting technology might have improved things.  Frank from RPA blogged it out here.  Even just the first step, mapping out a planning process, is certainly a useful exercise.  (In fact, Rob Goodspeed and I were recently dreaming of a website that does just that for past and current projects, but that’s a subject for another post).

So, in the spirit of keeping the momentum and discussion going, RPA will be hosting an event next week, where we’ll choose a project (or a series of projects), map out the process as it happened, and then insert opportunities for technology.  Kind of a planning project autopsy.  Here are the details:

When: Wednesday 12/2, 6:30pm.
Where: RPA’s Union Square office, 4 Irving Place (the ConEd building).
Please RSVP: http://bit.ly/5aQw16

If you like this kind of thing and want to join the ongoing conversation, head on over to the #planningtech Google Group.

Hope to see you there!

We were blown away by the great turnout at last Friday’s Tech for Participatory Planning workshop.  Thanks to RPA for hosting with us, and to everyone who came out for a great afternoon of lightning talks, brainstorming, and discussion.  It’s clear that we just scratched the surface here, and we raised way more questions than answers.

The questions we closed with were: what was your “a-ha moment?”  about technology and city planning, and, more importantly, what should we do next to dig deeper into these issues?   Scanning the Blogosphere, Frank from RPA has already written up two concrete ideas: Tech / planner speed dating and Mapping the state of collaborative planning.  Both a are worth a read, and we’ll be posting other ideas here as they surface.

For follow-up, we’ve joined forces with Christian Madera, host of the excellent City Planning, Civic Engagement and the Internet Summit at Princeton last spring, and will be conversing over at the PlanningTech Google Group that came out of that event.  The raw notes from Friday’s workshop have been posted there already.

Looking forward to what’s next…

Last week the first NYC BigApps meetup was held at our office and later this month on November 21st we’ll also serve as the venue for the NYC BigApps DevCamp (please RSVP).

The meetup last week was a good opportunity for app developers to learn more about the process and have a chance to talk to the people facilitating the contest. Brandon Kessler from ChallengePost led the meetup and helped to better explain the contest. Peter Robinson from NYC EDC was there to help explain the objectives and background of BigApps. Sam Litt and Murugan Kanpa from the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) were there to help answer a number of questions and field a lot of feedback about city data and NYC DataMine. Lou Klepner helped live-stream the meetup and the video is now available on Vimeo:

NYC BigApps – Nov 2, 2009 – Final from Lou Klepner on Vimeo.

On their blog today, Mobile Commons explains how AARP used text-to-voice to mobilize senior citizens around health care reform.

It’s not news that mobile (and particularly phone and sms) are the tech tools that connect with the widest audience, but I’m continually impressed by the way that Mobile Commons has built a platform that makes it super-easy to mix modes (text/phone/photo) using custom built workflows.  There’s so much opportunity for civic hacking here it makes my head hurt.

Here at TOPP Labs, we’re thinking about how projects like Community Almanac or FixCity could benefit from richer mobile experiences, and we’re planning to work more mobile into nearly all of our future civic engagement projects.  The Mobile Commons feature of using a text message to prompt a voice reply is particularly interesting to me, and could make for some really interesting public-space survey type apps.

So, what are the best examples you’ve seen of using mobile to leverage civic engagement?  What tools are you using?

Join us on December 12th as we host an NYC event for Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon.

We’ll be working a handful of projects, including CivicDB, FixMyStreet (Django), and the Local Representative Lookup.  If you’re interested in any of those, please come join us.  If you want to work on something else, please also come join us (and add your suggestions here or here).

Event details:

Civic Hacking @ The Great American Hackathon
Saturday, December 12th, 10:00am – 6:00pm
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette Street, PH
NY, NY 10013
RSVP: http://openny09.eventbrite.com/

We hope to see you there!