Hackable City makes local press

Out of the blue, I got a call from Providence Business News last week to talk about Hackable City. Working past my fumbling attempts at describing the concept of hackability as applied to an urban community, David Ortiz wrote a good article on the blog and some of the other hackable stuff happening in Providence.

Having said that, I haven't gotten any emails or comments since the paper came out, so perhaps it was unintelligible after all.

Read on for the full story, if you don't have a PBN account to access the article.

Allan Tear is trying to make Providence “hackable” – in a good way.

Tear, an innovation consultant whose firm, Aptus Collaborative, organizes projects for the Business Innovation Factory, has launched a Web log dedicated to exploring ways in which unlikely groups of people in the city are collaborating, forming social networks and seeking to participate in city planning and economic development.

The blog, “Hackable City: Providence,” advocates the notion that open-source philosophy – a movement in the IT industry away from closely guarded, proprietary software and technology platforms toward open, collaborative ones that “hackers” are encouraged to improve upon – can be used to understand social and economic trends occurring in Providence.

Tear said he launched the blog in March to help brand Providence as a bastion for creative-economy types, among other things.

“What I’m really attempting to do is to start documenting … how groups are beginning to work together, and starting to actually create templates that other people can use,” Tear said. “In the technology arena we’re seeing people like Providence Geeks; there’s the stuff that the Business Innovation Factory is doing with the NGen Network. In planning we see a lot of neighborhood groups starting to come together to exchange ideas and actually share best practices and team up working on things like the Providence Plan, the I-195 redevelopment.”

As an example of the “hackable” culture being created in Providence, Tear cites artists and industrial designers from The Steel Yard teaming up with technology experts from Providence Geeks to purchase a 3-D printer and link it to a milling machine at the Steel Yard, enabling both groups to do personal fabrication and rapid prototyping from computer designs and drawings.

There is now a tension within Providence city government, Tear said, between a push to become more “hackable,” or open and inclusive, and a pull to maintain traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic mechanisms of government.

The tension can be seen in the unfolding of the Providence Tomorrow neighborhood planning process, which Tear said was initially intended to be far more inclusive than it has been.

“I think we see the beginnings of some processes which could have some more community ownership,” Tear said. “But actually underlying them, I think, the structures that are running those processes still haven’t quite figured out how to let that happen.”

Regardless of how inclusive those planning processes turn out, an increasingly collaborative and innovative social environment is emerging in Providence, driven by artists, academics, students, entrepreneurs, technology geeks and members of the nonprofit sector, Tear said. The connections they are making may not be front-page news yet, but soon they may have major impacts on public policy and corporate innovation.

“I think that inevitably those people are going to continue to share information, make unusual connections, find ways to reuse what they do in one part of their world into another,” he said.

Tear, 36, a native Midwesterner, moved to Providence’s East Side from Atlanta five years ago. He has become a leading member of the Summit Neighborhood Association, bringing his “hackable” approach to neighborhood organizing.

Under Tear’s direction, the group has created how-to guides for residents seeking to organize block parties, tool exchanges, gardening clubs. One guide focuses on how to resolve disputes with local merchants over traffic, signage and other typical neighborhood issues.

Tear is now revamping the group’s Web site to make the guides available online.

“We’ve moved successively from a model where the neighborhood association’s job was to raise issues and to fight and to be sort of an advocacy group to one that actually builds these little tool kits to give to neighbors to build social capital on a street-by-street level,” Tear said.

“These are codes for social, neighbor-to-neighbor engagement,” he added. “Often you never get above that level of energy that actually starts to create a community, so we’re lowering that barrier to doing this.”