Moved!

Blog moved to OpenSourcePlanning.org! We decided we wanted more options that what blogger offers, so find us at our new domain!

Think back to February 2005

On Tim's point about new chances and new tools after the gaping hole of the last eight years -

I'm a kneejerk skeptical/pessemist when someone says that Web 2.0 or similar is going to transform how we all interact with cities, because the person saying it is probably citing Urban Spoon and the location-aware eight ball iPhone app. But consider this: Google Maps has only been around since February 2005, and Google Earth is a few months younger still. While it might have been possible to get aerial photos over the web covering a limited area before then*, the ease with which aerials and now a ton of additional data can be gathered is pretty amazing. Less than four years ago, only people with a big and expensive GIS could bring aerial photos to their community board meeting.

And today's improvements to Streetview are taking these online offerings to places that seemed beyond even the reach of mighty Google - this sad building in Delavan, Kansas, for example. What can planners do with Streetview (apart from explore the world from our couches)? Tons and tons. It's extremely exciting.

Putting aside the delights of iPhones and the gleaming diversions of whatever the location-based Facebook killer will be, the advent of freely available data creates a lot of new opportunites to work on climate change and beyond. For sharing data, understanding places, engaging with cities, and doing all that for free, we've come far in the last few years. Which has to be good for fixing the problem at hand, because we've a long long way still to go.


* does first place go to the DUSP/MassGIS collaboration, MIT Digital Orthophoto Browser, serving orthophotos of the Boston region from 1997 onwards?

Imagine the possibilities...

I keep finding painful reminders that we're only just now coming to terms with how much progress has been erased in the past 8 years.

Case in point, the US EPA EMPACT grants, R.I.P. 2001:

EMPACT Metro Grants support locally proposed and managed environmental monitoring and communication projects that emphasize active partnerships between local and state government, research institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the private sector, and the Federal Government. The EMPACT Program funded projects in three main categories: (1) EMPACT Metro Grants, (2) EPA-Sponsored EMPACT Projects (includes Technology Transfer & Integration projects...

Local environmental quality monitoring! Communication and technology transfer?! Active partnerships! You must be kidding...

It gets better when looking at some of the catalyst projects the grants once funded:

- Boulder Area Sustainability Information Network (BASIN): - Boulder, CO. Improve existing environmental monitoring to provide credible, timely and usable information about the watershed to the public. Create a state-of-the-art information management and public access infrastructure using advanced, web-based computer technologies.

- Burlington Eco Info: Community Based Environmental Monitoring in the Burlington Ecosystem, The Next Step in Building a Sustainable City: Burlington, VT. Engages citizens in developing environmental information accessible to a broad cross-section of residents and using this information to inform collaborative actions that address priority problems in the urban ecosystem.

Sigh. Not...sure..I..can..keep....reading...(or viewing websites that look like they were last touched in '99). Continuing on:

- Environmental Monitoring and Awareness Program (E-MAP) for Healthy Water: Cheyenne, Wyoming. Provides a community-based approach to protecting the health and welfare of Cheyenne and Laramie County, WY residents by building public capacity and desire to participate in environmental issues related to water.

Wyoming?! I bet you can guess who 404'ed that one...

- Detroit-Ann Arbor Metro Public Information Project: Detroit-Ann Arbor, Michigan. Aims to bring together essential environmental data and create a mechanism for its easy access by the public in a timely fashion, to interpret the information in a way that is understandable by the public, and to provide an intensive public outreach and education campaign regarding community-based environmental information.

Easily understood and accessible data and public environmental education!? Wha?!!!

- Community Water Quality Information System for a New and Sustainable Water Supply (Tucson, AZ) - The objectives of this project are to: 1) expand monitoring of water quality parameters in potable water supplies, discharges, and streams, 2) set up near real-time information access to monitoring data, and 3) communicate the information to citizens with particular emphasis on Hispanic, Native American and medical communities.

- ECOPLEX-Environmental Conditions On-Line for the Dallas-Fort Worth MetroPLEX: Denton (Dallas/Fort Worth), TX. Informs citizens of the current, historical, and near-term forecasts of environmental conditions to which they are exposed, including water, land, sun and air.

Looks like those two survived in some crippled state, but phew, I've gotta stop before I hyperventilate. (Those are only some examples within the water section!)

Pardon the hyperbole, but let's be honest. Imagine what these programs could become with today's possibilities for open communication and planning. So while I'm holed up in the studio thinking I'm doing something new and innovative pertaining to citizen-generated urban environmental data, I need look no further than that gaping hole called the past 8 years.

Oh yeah, President-Elect Obama, if you're reading this, I'm positive that myself and the rest of the bloggers on this site have no less than 4,621 great ideas to put this type of funding to productive use should you be so gracious to reinstate. Fingers crossed!

Transcript! Walking the talk: Central City Concern's building water reuse report

Here's a very lightly edited transcript of the interview with Ben Gates. Just a fun sidenote: the transcript was generated by posting a task on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service - 5 bucks for transcribing 18-minutes of audio.

Ben Gates Interview

Bomee: So we're talking about this idea of whether there is something worth discussing in the area, the field, of urban planning that could fairly be called open source paradigm for planning. And whether this idea of enabling planning practice is something that deserves to be considered along-side things like, you know, public participation, access, these other sorts of things we think about as part and parcel of what constitutes planning.

So, what we're doing, one of the things I wanted to do was run around and look at examples where planners really have made this idea of sharing or enabling other peoples practices a key part of the work that they're doing. And it seems to me like, just what little I've heard about your project, come a little closer, what I've heard about your project, it seems like you guys really were working with this idea of enabling other folks to do similar things in mind. So I'm really curious to hear a little bit about your project, and what role, or where in the process of planning, your thoughts about how do I get other people to be able use these resources that I've put together came into play. And then, you know, just tell us a little bit about what you're working on.

Ben: Cool, and we're on tape.

Bomee: Right. And your name is Ben...?

Ben: Ben Gates, and I work with Central City Concern in Portland Oregon. We're a non-profit organization that works in the areas of affordable housing development and also a provider of social services. We started out 30 years ago by addressing the drug and alcohol problem in Portland and started a detoxification center, quickly realized that those people need housing too, in order to be successful. Started that, both transitional and permanent housing and also employment services and physical and mental health services. So we have about 1400 units of housing that we've built in the central city of Portland., primarily for individuals, but also some family housing. I started working with them three years ago through the Rose Architectural Fellowship. And that allowed me to take on some planning projects that were, maybe, above and beyond what a normal non-profit would do because here they had this person who was funded through foundation supports and could work on some of these issues.

So my main project has been, and is, realizing a urban family housing: high rise, mixed-use, building with a community center and child-care facility in downtown Portland. The presenter this morning from AARP talked about the Pearl District as being livable neighborhood where we want to build this affordable housing. And really early on, we realized there was some potential to involve other folks and individuals because it was such an innovative project. Bringing families into a new urbanized central city. And we decided that one of our goals for that project was to achieve a living building challenge, which is a new pilot project of a local USGBC chapter. It's going beyond LEED to look at what would be a truly sustainable building. So it's got goals such as net zero energy, water independence, no use of toxic materials; very simple requirements, but really profound. And our strategy for that project was really to say, okay, well, you know, this is definitely going to require some additional investment and it's not going to be paid for, you know, with the normal way we do development. But because this project is significant, because we're setting this goal, we think that it's going to draw lots of people to be involved in the project.

And one of our first considerations in working towards that goal was just taking one of the sustainability issues and really looking at it in depth. And so we asked ourselves, What was the most difficult aspect of the truly sustainable building. And we decided that water independence was. And so by water independence, I mean what if a building were able to harvest all the rain water that falls on site, re-use gray water, re-use black water, so that no water leaves the site. Basically using all of your available resources and it's difficult because the regulatory environment, there's lots of agencies involved in water, from the Department of Environmental Quality to the Health Divisions, to Building Codes and it's complicated. Often times agencies don't talk to each other. And so people who want to incorporate these innovative strategies like gray water harvesting and reuse to save flush toilets have a hard time doing so because they just don't understand how to go about it. So we said that we were going to look at the entire regulatory environment, explain these systems in a mixed-use building, and we are going to tell people how to navigate the regulatory environment. Initially we thought we'd explain how to do a building by building appeal of how to incorporate each of these systems.

And so, that project started a year ago. We received foundation support from the Bullitt Foundation , a local northwest foundation interested in environmental issues, Enterprise Community Partners, and Cascadia Regional Green Building Chapter Portland Development Commission, so some other, kind of small, really local matching grants of folks that are interested. In addition, the team who took it on, are architects, engineers, were so excited about the work that they also wanted to contribute some of their own time to the project. And so there are lots of in-kind contributions, because through this audacious goal they would be pushing the envelope and leaning a lot for themselves and the other projects that they were doing. So, here we are, you know, a year later, after starting with the intention of, you know, exploring this with the intent of applying it on our building, but also to share the work we've learned with other individuals, and we're nearly complete with our final report, that's going to be released in January. It's going to be made freely available to everybody.

Let me explain it's significance for Oregon, which was our target area; the State of Oregon. And then also for other jurisdictions. In Oregon, what we did is, we explained the entire regulatory environment, so we have this road map, and we also found that you can pursue change not on a building by building basis, but state-wide. So we found a way, as we've explained in our report, to work with your local codes division and your local boards who have jurisdiction on these issues to allow some of these strategies to be used statewide. So, particularly in Oregon, you used to have to get a permit for rainwater harvesting and gray water harvesting wasn't allowed. Now you don't need a permit for rainwater harvesting and gray water harvesting is allowed, also without , you know, a special building appeal. So we've succeeded in removing a couple of the barriers to water independence and it's significant because where a lead kind of platinum building or advanced building could achieve 30-40 percent water savings through energy efficiency measures, now with , for example, in our high-rise development, as in other multi-family building, we can achieve, in Oregon, not justa 30-40 percent water savings, but a 70-80 percent water savings, which is absolutely huge. And it's not just our building, but any building in Oregon that converts to that now. And that's not only with commercial buildings but we changed that for residential buildings as well.

So the great thing about this project was that it became not just academic but actually had real tangible results. So the benefit, I think, beyond Oregon and other jurisdictions is that we've created this road map, template, which is a very, kind of, simple to understand diagram for water systems in buildings, mapped out each of the regulatory agencies for Oregon. Now other jurisdictions can use our roadmap, template, and even, we'll explain our process, they can adopt certain aspects of the process we went through, as appropriate, and create a road map for their own environments. What it's been helpful in doing is, we're able to, kind of get all of these different regulatory agencies around the table and have discussions with them with this road map in hand and it actually starts to, even, show them, like, where, kind of, anomalies are, or help them understand where they have jurisdiction over it. Because often times, they're not even sure and they're pointing fingers at somebody else and the other person isn't really the problem and it starts to, really, unveil some of the inconsistencies in the environment.

Bomee: So I think one of the reasons we started thinking about the importance of how we create a framework for sharing information as a planners has to do with this idea that in order for us to have a meaningful response, whether you're talking about the mitigation of climate change, in other words, figuring out how to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, or whether you're talking about adaptation to the things that we are not going to be able to stop from happening, that what we really need to do is have responses that are much faster than what we've been able to muster together, and also at a much greater scale than what we've been able to do in the past. And so, I was wondering, listening to your story, to what extent does this question of the speed of change or the scale that you could achieve, how much was that, really, in the forefront of your thought processes as you were designing this process?

Ben: I definitely agree that, that is a problem. I think, we thought about this issue of scale, you know, in three ways. And definitely we thought about it because it's an important part of our strategy to get a living building built. And also to use it as an example to accelerate change in the industry. So scale jumping: we have a real project that we want to apply this work to and I think that's key. In order to even have a plan looked at often times it needs to be implemented and people need to see how actually it was executed in the end so you have both those aspects. So this early work, hopefully it will result in a built project. Definitely now other projects in Oregon are taking on gray water re-use and so there is going to be built projects beyond ours. So
I think it's about really applying it to something that will actually get built, not just an academic project, but then, thinking about how what you're doing is useful to other folks in the industry and around the world. So we took a kind of national approach. We said, you know, we could never understand every jurisdiction, but we could give people the tools and ideas about a process by which they can understand their own jurisdiction. And let's not, like, keep this as proprietary information that just our team has access to and can apply because it creates a market niche for them. Let's make sure that our non-profit organization is spear-heading an approach by which we can capture all of these tools and then make them freely available to others. And so we're looking at, you know, an open-source or creative-commons license where just anybody can know that this work has been authored so that it's freely available in the public domain. And I'd be interested to talk to you about that based on your experience.

Bomee: Well, you bring up, I think, one of the real key questions about sharing , which is, when you're talking about something where you're creating a new product, where you've brought together information in a way that other people haven't before, I think there's a worry that if you somehow give it away or you make it available to other people that you're sort of, you know, like, letting go of a proprietary product that gives you some kind of an edge or gives your organization a competitive claim on. So, did you, was there any point in what you were doing where you got push-back on this idea of sharing? Because it'll make it easier for other people to block it...

Ben: Yes. I think it's been an education process for me. And it deals with copyright issues and creative work and that kind of stuff. I think that if we want to share this information we're going to need to understand these issues of copyright and sharing work. So, early on when we were creating our contracts with our consultants to carry out this work, we made sure to retain ownership of all the creative work. You know, and even in an architecture contract there's language, in there, that says the architect is the owner of the creative work. We changed that, so that the non-profit, we Central City, are the owner and author of the work, and we gave them, you know, fully paid-up rights to use the work in their own projects. But what that allowed us to do, since we're the authors of it then we can determine what the use rights are for them. So it kind of takes away the creative rights of all the team members, puts it under one author, and I think the non-profit is a great organization to control that authorship because they have the mission and the values and, in our case we've attracted funders because of our ability to say, okay, now we're going to share this with a greater audience. And then, what we're allowed to do is then freely share that because we're the author and we have the authorship to do that, or the permissions to do that. So I don't know that that's always, you know, the best strategy, but that's the strategy that we took. Because, I think, that with any creative plan or product there is, people who want to retain that and keep it close, for whatever reasons. And you know, as the convener of a project you're in a really great position to say, Okay, from the get-go with this project our value and our mission is to get, run a product option, and by investing and working on this project it's assumed that all of your work is going to be shared. And I think, you know, initially that might be greeted with hesitation among consultants, but I think, what they've all realized is that they've gotten huge attention from all of this work. Our architects and engineers in particular have now started printing a road map for Washington. They've been contracted by Clark County to do that. One of the foundation supporters of our project interviewed our architects and engineers on one of the buildings they're working on that's going for a living building challenge. And so it really helps, I think, our team become leaders in the field.

Bomee: That's great. So then my last question is, in your work in this area, was there ever a moment when you felt like if somebody else who had either data or some other kind of information, where you wished that person or that organization had, had the same kind of attitude about sharing. Like a moment when you were like, if this were just something I had access to, why didn't these guys stop to think about sharing?

Ben: That's a good question. You know, recently with one of my consultants, they have this water calculator that they've created, and there's been some data that I've been trying to put together and map and chart about costs of water use and cost of water, or savings,
associated with water savings in dollar amounts, that I've been wanting to graph and put together. And it's been very difficult because the consultant is, that's proprietary material of theirs and they've been kind of unwilling, to date, to share the inner workings of that
kind of calculator. So they've been sharing the information, but you don't really have the original data to work with and manipulate. So that's one really close example of that. And then a second is that, you know, just the availability of information on the web is really, you'd think there'd be more information about water conservation and water use strategies. But it's been really hard to dig up. There's are a lot of trade associations that you have to have a membership to get access to their reports and so as a researcher working in this field, it's difficult in that regard.

Bomee: Okay! Well, thank you very much for your time and the work that you do.

Ben: Thanks, Bomee.

Fear of the face-plant

Learning from failure is like me (out of shape person) and working out: I know it's supposed to be good for you, but I'm certainly not eager to do it in public, what with all that sweating and grunting.

C.S. Lewis apparently once wrote “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” and Colin Powell, that “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

I think someone famous ought to elaborate on this theme of learning from failure and say something like "Learning alone from failure makes profits, but sharing failure makes markets." <- feel free to modify and redistribute, no attribution.

For example here's a story about a how an ED blogging the financial woes of her nonprofit is benefiting a whole tribe of consultants, EDs of other organizations, as well as herself.

One hurdle to this notion of deep radical sharing is that it's not all that appealing to be wrong in public. I think we all need to take a deep breath and get over it.

Nuts and bolts - data sharing

Both Alison and Bomee mentioned sharing data as a starting point for greater openness. Two things immediately spring to mind: how we structure our data and how information about the data is stored (technically known as metadata, or more typically the answer to: does anyone remember what year these numbers are from? More on metadata another time).

Storing information in ways that frustrate further analysis is condemning those data to illustrate only one point about the world. Conversely, structuring it for flexible reuse allows your analysis AND my analysis, and more in the future. For example, consider the total frustration involved in trying to copy data from a existing pdf file. Or, more broadly, the limits on potential investigation that stems from limited sharing of data. If we could be simpler about structuring information, sharing becomes easier, making the information more useful as building blocks in other people's work. Only sharing the final tables is not really sharing.

Thinking about structuring data comes from the same territory as GTD ("getting things done") - simpler is better, and setting some simple rules up front are better than many complex systems later. Storing numerical data in the simplest-possible structure means you can send it to someone else, and there's a good chance that the information will be useful without hours of reformatting. I'm mostly thinking about spreadsheets here, and when I say simple structure I really do mean simple - maybe just a list of names and values, no subtotals, no clever cross-tabulation. But the point here is not to get stuck on a particular template or format - it's to work in the mindset that all data will be passed on, and looser, less complex information stands a better chance of getting re-use.

The idea of effective data structures is not a unique benefit for aspirant open source planners. It's a good idea in any context, especially teamwork or conducting any research where you aren't trying to fit the facts to your existing conclusion. A decent structure becomes most relevant if you want to share with outsiders. In my silo of interest, numbers describing transport mode share might have a particular importance - maybe I'm interested in tracking changes in auto use. For someone else, the same information could be an input into a carbon footprint analysis, or something else entirely that isn't on my horizon right now. If I spend time assembling my data and then lock it down, I'm probably preventing someone else from going in a fresh direction with a boost from whatever groundwork I laid. Is the purpose of my report to illustrate some points with robustness and confidence? Probably. Does that mean I can't also share the information in a simple and flexible way, and explain the ways I processed it? No, but mostly we get used to seeing everyone's final, formatted, pdf'd data.

I can't find the right analogy for this - something like making bricks and also giving away mud and straw, with the straw in neat bundles... But it would be really exciting if we all got into the habit of storing numbers in very simple ways, then sharing the information in beautiful formatted pdfs and also those simple raw data files.

So what does this mean in practical, file format type terms? For now, I'm entirely neglecting issues of copyright and data sharing agreements, which can be serious stumbling blocks. Not to mention more complex data such as source files for geographic data that goes into maps. There are also exciting things going on in other fields, such as info sharing in pharma trials, or Swivel's data sharing and charting tools.

Here are some very basic ideas, a non-exhaustive list.

For structuring,

• try to be self-documenting - use a logical name for columns, etc
  
• keep spreadsheets simple - no merged cells, no sub-totals, no text mixed in with numbers, nothing that prevents someone from taking your data in a new direction.
• preserve base tables as much as possible - don't perserve your only copy of data in a formatted-for-print excel workbook. A spreadsheet with a row for every item is easiest to work with (but lousy to describe with words - I'll come back to this and talk about the utter magic of analysis with pivot tables in another post).
• really learn to use excel (or your comparable spreadsheet tool).

For sharing,

• make your final tables available in multiple file formats, not just a PDF.
  
• give out text versions of everything (why not?).
  
• make your source files available.
• document your sources - not just "Census 2000". SF1? SF2? which fields? you kept track of that information, right?
• ask others for their base data - rather like a nudist beach, everyone will be more comfortable if they see others out there. And if you can require someone to share, even better.
  

Walking the talk: Central City Concern's building water reuse report

Last night, I met a recent Rose Fellow who has been doing exactly the kind of thing that we're talking about: building tools for rapid, scale-able change. While working on a 200-family affordable housing building in the Pearl district of Portland, Ben Gates found that in order to do 100% recycling of water on-site, he and his team needed to figure out what the regulatory roadblocks were and at what particular aspects of the system they applied to. Rather than just plowing through with just the one project in mind, he coordinated an effort that produced a guide (soon to be available free online) that documents not only the hurdles specific to Oregon, but is designed to be adapted by other builders in other States. Listen to a quick interview with Ben (Or download the interview - 2.7 MB mp4), in which he describes the project and talks about the challenges & benefits to going "copy left":