The distinction between traditional grassroots/bottom-up/everyone's-voice-matters planning and the open source planning paradigm needs to be examined, if for no other reason than so that we as planners don't walk away from the idea thinking, "Hey, we already think collective contribution is paramount. We've been doing that for decades."
The idea of Open Source, as I my non-techie mind grasps it, is that the author(s) of some thing put not only the product out there but also expose the nuts-and-bolts of it with all kinds of open areas for other people to look in, lock in, or rebuild elsewhere for different purposes.
Today's news headlines offer a great example: using Google searches to track flu outbreaks. I'm pretty sure that the people who first put together the search engine weren't thinking about tracking flu outbreaks. But they were thinking about allowing their idea out into the wild. (Here's a link to the article on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/11/11/google.flu.trends/) Another Google example is Sue and Paul's pedometer. Google it if you don't know what I mean...
So, instead of just thinking that you need to create a master plan, a funding program, or whatever product-making that occupies your professional time, think about how you can also create a platform.
What exactly the platform might look like for a planner is something we have to figure out. For a lot of us, it won't be as simple as sharing your dataset (which is not without challenges). How do we share the pieces that went into a stormwater landscaping plan? A homeownership program? I'm not sure. Bomee suggested to me that we ask the question, "What is the most basic level of information and how can I share it?"
Not to be too idealistic, if that's possible when we're just starting to talk ideas, but part of this Open Source Planning Paradigm is that I don't have to figure out what the platform looks like for all permutations -- I just have to open the door to my wee brain and shove my idea about it out into the world. If it's worthwhile, someone else will make use of it and make it better.
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2 comments:
Thanks for putting a spotlight on how to articulate the difference between this open source paradigm idea and the top down/bottom up discourse.
After the talk at Rutgers, one of the students asked two additional questions related to your point:"who are we enabling?" and "aren't you opening yourself up to more effective opposition if you share?".
The first question gets at a seam in the analogy with open source -- the student was pointing out that when your code is available, it's other people who are capable of doing something with it (or at least users who are highly motivated to learn) that you're targeting.
The second question, I think, pinpoints one of the reasons why planners are reluctant to bare all: because it's so hard to get plans implemented, you don't want to give the opposition more ammunition.
Thoughts?
Here's another example of "platform, not just product" -- except in this case, the platform IS a product! You may not have heard of Amazon Web Services, but folks bringing you new Web 2.0 services have! Basically, it's Amazon taking the work they had to do in order to be able to serve all that e-commerce all over the world and allowing other folks to use the platform on a very usage-based fee structure. It's pretty amazing.
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