What happens when you use the ideas of open source and hackability in a society, and a city ?
Hackability: allowing and encouraging people to make an environment be what they want it to be. Reciprocity between users and designers. Transparency and graceful responses to unanticipated uses.
I'm a sucker for trying to find valid crossovers between virtual worlds and our real world, where the interplay adds to our face-to-face interactions, rather than simply sucking us into our computers.
Along these lines, I had a great chat with Eric Gordon from Emerson College today, who is shepherding an experiment in Boston called Hub2. They are using Second Life environments to reimagine poorly designed public spaces in Boston, then using that to fuel discussion between citizens in the real world. Check it.
Hub2 strives for a Boston where all residents take control and ownership of their neighborhoods, enlisting digital environments and networks to strengthen real-world spaces and relationships. Hub2 invites community members to collaboratively imagine, articulate, and assert a vision for the kind of neighborhood they wish to inhabit. We use appropriate technology to facilitate that visioning process and as an amplifier for grassroots voices articulating their common dreams.
Hackable Idea of the Week has been on a bit of a hiatus, but a story on NPR's Weekend Edition caught my ear.
Across the country, citizen-run guerilla drive-ins are springing up in municipal public spaces and vacant lots. A loose collective of folks puts together a showing of a movie projected outdoors on the side of a building, and invites other people to show up. Primarily an urban phenomenon, the drive-ins have an anarchistic edge, with loose organization, word-of-mouth promotion, and an emphasis on reclamation of public spaces with spontaneous activity.
Here in Providence, Cornish Associates, an urban development company, has been running movie nights on Thursdays during the summer, without the self-organized subversive construct of the Guerilla Drive-Ins. Still, props to them for being a catalyst.
Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive in offers a DIY guide to starting your own.
New York has been doing some heavy lifting on sustainability. Given that cities consume 75% of the world's energy, it would only seem to make sense, and its good to see Bloomberg and NYC leading the charge here.
New York Sun Works has created the Science Barge, which combines environmental education and sustainable agriculture. I'm not very fond of the name, but the underlying idea is pretty cool. The barge is a zero-carbon hydroponic farm, producing local organic produce in the city.
Urban gardens have been around forever, but they compete for space with for-profit development or affordable housing, and often lose.
But local food production is a hackable idea, truly something the community can own, modify, and share. In the industrial era it made sense to separate production from distribution, but local and distributed methods of producing life's staples are seeming wise in the emerging energy/sustainability economy. Fuel costs and weather instability are driving produce prices through the roof, and much of that produce can now be produced locally using new techniques for much less money.
Cities aren't exactly agricultural epicenters. Food and water are shipped over hundreds, even thousands of miles to reach urban areas, and that consumes a massive amount of processing and transportation fuel, which in turn contributes excess carbon dioxide to Earth's atmosphere. Traditional agriculture, too, consumes energy and large amounts of water, and despite the popularity of organic food, toxic pesticides are still in wide use. And since the world population is continuing to grow rapidly, Caplow explained, it's going to get worse. "As our city grows with new people and new buildings, it will place increasingly huge demands on the countryside for food, for power, and for water," he said to the crowd.
New York Sun Works estimates that there is enough roof space in NYC for roof gardens to supply all the food needs of New Yorkers. This is a bold statement, given that it takes an area the state of Wyoming to do so, but I'm impressed they did the math.
This barge is a metaphor for us and for the future of this planet," said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. "We can float together, or we'll surely sink together."
It leaves me with a strong impression that a little creativity and entrepreneurial activity could see a network of roof gardens take root and flower.
I've never been much into Second Life and the other alternative worlds that have caught fire online of late. My current passion much more about how the web can support and enhance our pavement-level interactions, which often get short shrift to the virtual world. Last week at the Providence Geeks confab, I saw a project that brings those things together.
The folks at Eyegloo are working on recreating downtown Providence in Second Life, the most wide-ranging and immersive of the current 3-D online worlds. We saw some early versions of walking (and flying) around Providence, including the Biltmore, the completed Westin, and the Convention Center.
Why is this more than a parlor trick? A couple of reasons:
Virtual Providence blends the virtual with the real, creating a parallel place where visitors and citizens can interact with not just the city that is, but the city that will be. Real interactions can cross that secondlife-streetlife barrier, initially to promote commerce - see, spec and build your new condo at Waterplace, by interacting with the architect and development company ! Visit the new restaurant on Federal Hill, browse the real menu, and have a virtual meal ! But if the City takes hold of this, you could imagine virtual town halls, online tours of alternative visions of the waterfront, or even rapidly developed school designs, based on feedback from a neighborhood or online meeting the night before.
Which leads to the second compelling element of Virtual Providence, open source extensibility. Because Second Life has developed its own language for modeling and creating visual 3-d worlds, anyone could extend Virtual Providence. Summit Neighborhood Association, who are working on re-visioning North Main, could build a Virtual North Main based on the community vision of what could be. Providence Public Schools, Ai3 architects, and East Side Public Education Coalition could build a working version of the Nathan Bishop the community is demanding.
A few other points, one optimistic, the other troubling. Optimistic: the technology underlying Second Life has enormous promise to stand traditional community planning and visioning on its head. Although architects and planners would claim an iterative, collaborative process, the limitations of arranging public meetings, funneling feedback, and creating architectural renderings that are "professional" has forced a linear, filtered, overly mediated approach. A virtual world where you could build out, alter, or present multiple versions in a few hours or days in response to community feedback would blow up the process of community planning and development as we know it. These versions would be visually immersive, and much more evocative than the "perspectives" and "overlays" of today's architects and urban planners. The first city (and architect/planning firm !) to harness this effectively will dramatically alter how planning works with the public, for the better.
This brings up the troubling point: inclusiveness. Even though Virtual Providence is less of a fantasy geek's paradise than, say, Dracula's Castle (another Second Life "island"), it still is the purview of the young and the wired. Income and age continue to play an enormous role in the digital divide in Providence and around the country, and we continue to approach the challenge clumsily, with brute force solutions. An online community that narrows the social environment conversation even further will promote no interesting connections, and create no buy-in.
Here lies an opportunity. Our attempts to bridge the digital divide have focused single-mindedly on equal access and foundation skills: computers in libraries and schools, wireless for all, Windows training for seniors. Recent research in learning shows that learners, of any age, can be started out further up the scale of complexity than we previously thought, interacting with an interesting and exciting application rather than laboring on the underlying theory. Lets invest in facilitation of new groups into something like Virtual Providence - immigrants, seniors, working poor - giving them something exciting, visually compelling, and emotionally relevant. Sounds better than Excel skills anyday.
The Open Planning Project, which had alpha-launched several months ago, looks like its getting to its next state of maturity with OpenPlans. Sort of a wiki for community planning and organizing, it offers some good tools for building community projects using online tools.
OpenPlans aims to transform social activism by providing tools that connect people and enable them to share ideas, stay organized, and act collectively to effect change.
Whether you are advocating for public space or working towards better schools, we hope you use OpenPlans to make your community a better place. Our tools help you create or contribute to web sites, share files, upload photos, manage mailing lists, and manage task lists.
Its Monday, and I already have my Hackable Idea of the Week ! Check out this article at Wired, on how a library IT director put together a grassroots technology learning program for her staff.
When the IT director at North Carolina's Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes -- a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.
Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.
...the success of Learning 2.0 shows that the human problem of retraining workers is often being tackled from the ground up.
Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.
They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.
I love several things about this:
its an open source learning modality, supported by technology, but really about learning the new tools for societal engagement
it employs creative destruction of accepted professional training - a training company wins a contract, schedules a class, teaches ABC, which are outdated as soon as the class finishes, and charges an extortionate amount
its re-usable ! we need the same thing for non-profit leaders, public school teachers, health workers, and everyone else at the front line of our civil society
A friend of mine in the U.K. has invested in a mobile user-created content company called TrustedPlaces. They are just up and running in the U.K. mainly London. I love their idea. Members use their phones to capture pics of local places that are "trusted", good food, good service, good atmosphere, good stuff. They can then write a review via mobile, or when they return to their computer, on the "trusted place". The trustedplaces.com site does a bang-up web 2.0 job of displaying the places, tagging, reviews, average ratings, trusted places nearby, other fans, etc.
Members (Trusted People) can then use their phone to get a place forwarded to them, look up the nearest trusted place, find nearby places, search for a tag, and so on.
I love these simple apps that use the (mobile) web to support our real world pavement level needs !
