Recently, we’ve been working with a lot of public agencies (mostly in the transportation sector) who are interested in setting up developer conferences or app contests.   While we are big fans of both conferences and contests, our main point of advice has been get away from thinking just about conferences & contests, and focus on building an holistic developer outreach program.  Since we’ve been having these discussions mostly through private channels, we also wanted to put our thoughts out there for everyone.  So, below is the initial list of recommendations we’ve been developing:

Focus on building a holistic and sustainable developer program & community, not a one-off
conference or contest. The ultimate goal is to encourage developers to build apps that improve the civic
experience. Conferences and contests are important pieces of the puzzle, but aren’t complete solutions on their own.

Release early and often. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but this actually reduces risk, since it allows for
constant feedback and readjustment, which helps you avoid veering off on the wrong track. Small,
incremental improvements, coupled with avenues for feedback from developers, will cultivate a
stronger and more sustainable community.

Speak developer. Be genuine, open, and responsive. Good examples of this are BART’s recently
redesigned developer website and the tone that MassDOT/ MBTA has struck on their Google Group.

With these ideas in mind, here are ten specific recommendations for how to build a robust
developer community (in this case focusing on transit, specifically, but the basic principles apply to all sectors):

1. Choose one or two people in the agency to be a consistent presence on the Google Group and at meetups. This will help build trust and improve developer relations by putting a human face on your developer policies.
2. Start with a friendly and honest introduction on your Google Group, and invite developers to be part of the process – to be active allies and not a passive audience.
3. Schedule your first meetup.  At the end of that meeting, decide with the attendees when to schedule the next one (in two weeks, in a month, depending on interest and current activities)
4. Show progress by making incremental improvements to the data sets and by releasing new sources of data. Don’t try to guess what developers might want; just ask them. This becomes increasingly easy to do as you build relationships with more and more developers.
5. Be clear and honest about the constraints when releasing data: if it’s not logistically or economically feasible to release certain data sets, say so.
6. After you have held a few meetups and have gotten to know the developer community, plan your conference or contest. A good format would be a hybrid unconference/conference, with organized introductory speakers and unconference slots in the afternoon. Weekends are best, as is starting after 11am.  Once you have an active relationship with the developer community, they can help you plan aspects of the conference.
7. If you want to do an app contest and announce the winners at the conference, you will need to build in more lead time to ensure that developers have time to build high-quality, useful apps.
8. When considering keynote speakers for a dev conference, consider both tech industry leaders as well as high-ranking agency representatives, to demonstrate agency buy-in.
9. Prizes: tours of publicly inaccessible areas, including control rooms, bridges, abandoned tunnels, or construction zones, would be great prizes. A chance to use a train or bus simulator would also be an exciting prize for transit developers, specifically (MBTA gave away a session in the bus simulator as well as “golden” Charlie Cards as prizes in their app contest).
10. Most importantly: don’t think that you need to have all the answers. The sooner you can reach out and engage with the wider developer community – even with just a few messages to the Google Group – the sooner you can benefit from the feedback, ideas, and energy of a much larger base of supporters.

As you know, there are examples of other agencies who have taken many of these ideas to heart, most
notably the MBTA, BART, and TriMet.  Looking closely at what each of these agencies has done is the first step towards developing a successful and sustainable dev program.

Written by Nick Grossman and Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

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…

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?

Dear friend / planner / city staffer / community organizer / software engineer / entrepreneur / planning geek:

The Open Planning Project and the Regional Plan Association would like to invite you to an upcoming workshop to brainstorm new technology for participatory city planning.

When: Friday, November 13th, 12:30 – 5:30pm  (followed by a happy hour on our roof).

Where: The Open Planning Project, 148 Lafayette St, NY, NY

What: An afternoon of discussion, brainstorming, and collaborative product designing.

RSVP: http://planningtechworkshop.eventbrite.com/ (please RSVP by 11/6, attendance is limited)

Why:

Everyday social computing, mobile technology, and the adoption of web 2.0 approaches by governments have laid the groundwork for far wider citizen involvement in civic life.  Citizens can now be involved earlier on, more frequently, and in more meaningful ways than was ever possible before.  How can these opportunities be leveraged for use in the city planning space? What are the technologies that will make this possible?  What are the bureaucratic, logistical, or social issues that need to be addressed in considering these ideas?  What tools could we build — today — that would be the most impactful?

The Open Planning Project is interested in developing free, open source tools to support citizen engagement in planning.  To that end, we are reaching out to the planning, government, nonprofit, citizen and tech communities to help us explore opportunities and share ideas.  This event should be the first of many, and will be a hands-on workshop aiming to bring together many diverse perspectives.

How:

The workshop will follow the unconference, or BarCamp, format, where sessions and talks are proposed and led by the participants of the workshop.  Please visit the workshop wiki at http://etherpad.com/GfjsHfnoGi to see the agenda, an overview of the format, and a list of proposed talks & sessions.  Please feel free to add your ideas directly to the wiki — we’ll also be reaching out to attendees in advance to prepare some talks & sessions.

Pass it along:

Please pass on this invitation to anyone who might be interested.  Attendance will be capped at 60 people, on a first-come, first-served basis, and we’re hoping for a mix of sectors and perspectives.  Please RSVP by 11/6 at http://planningtechworkshop.eventbrite.com/ We realize this is somewhat short notice, so we hope you are able to make it.

Thanks, and we’re looking forward to seeing you on the 13th!

Photo by Ivan Walsh on Flickr

Are you a web developer with Python and Geo chops, looking for a fun side project?  Even better, are you also a resident of Greater Boston, interested in city planning and civic engagement?  Do you know someone who is?

If so, let us know.  The Open Planning Project is partnering with the Somerville Community Corporation to develop an interactive web app to better engage citizens in the planning process around the Green Line extension project.  The app would be 100% open source, and would build off of some of the core tools we’ve been developing and using here at TOPP Labs and OpenGeo (including Django, OpenLayers, GeoServer, PostGIS, and components of Community Almanac & FixCity).

SCC is seeking a talented, civic-minded volunteer developer to make the project happen.  Here’s the full job description (short link: http://bit.ly/1PkM17).  The developer will work very closely with SCC from start to finish, with guidance from TOPP’s lead developers.  Please pass it on!