Week 5 saw Mayo return to New York just in time for the Talk to Me opening at MoMA, where his City Tickets was featured alongside a variety of great projects generally organized around exploring the communication between people and machines. Many faculty and friends were in attendance, so it was a great chance to catch up with folks from afar, though the crowd made it less possible to get a real feel for the show itself. Will have to return sometime in the near future.

When we’d both recovered, we had the opportunity to sit down and do some collaborative brainstorming about the various attributes of the public objects that provide inputs to and outputs from municipal systems. The idea here was to determine where citizens already interact with city (controlled) infrastructure, and in what ways, to set a context and a menu of options for where and how citizens might be able to interact with JANE. It also seemed that a growing catalog of public objects and their attributes would likely become a valuable resource for other projects we engage in.

In addition to documenting bits about the kinds of interfaces and physical attributes each object has, the system we came up with (though surely imperfect in this first draft,) breaks things down along a variety of dimensions, namely:

• Does the object primarily serve the interests of the municipality, its citizens, or both?
• Is the object primarily for input or output?
• Does it accept / transmit binary data, quantitative data, or qualitative data?
• Is that data a free or constrained set?
• Does it primarily have a local effect, or does it tie into a larger service?
• Is the object itself under public (citizen,) private (municipality,) or corporate control, or some combination?
• Is the object fixed in one location, or mobile?
• Does the object have some kind of network connection?
• How much technology is housed in the object? (As a rough guideline, I’d argue this is a proxy for how “repurposable” the object is.)

This framework agreed upon, we decided to construct cards for each object, to facilitate future brainstorming and organizing activities. After a bit of a scavenger hunt to get example images for each object (finding some new ones along the way,) I was able to come back and work through the dimensions for each, finding that most held up, though some more robustly than others.

I found the biggest challenges where objects act as both inputs and outputs, but the kind and quality of accompanying data may be greatly different for different parties. These distinctions are at times very important, but aren’t always absolutely clear. There are also often questions about what the system supports, what citizens are allowed to do with the system, and what they’re willing to do with it. In both regards, it seems there might be a value in going a little bit more granular than this first pass.

Mayo and I also agreed that there’s something not fully resolved with the public–private–corporate trichotomy. There’s some amount of grey area between these categories, and it feels like there are possibilities that aren’t well covered (this was discussed in an article I read a few weeks ago but haven’t been able to find since.) It’s not entirely clear for example, where a large interactive advertisement, which is on private property but accessible from the sidewalk, and accepts free input from passers-by would fall. This might be the most interesting area in need of refinement as objects that straddle these boundaries are likely to increase in prevalence.

This upcoming week will see Adam back on Tuesday, and J.D. in the office for the first time on Thursday. It’ll be nice to have a full house, but I’m also looking forward to making an escape upstate when the week is through.

Since secret reveals are so much fun, I’ll start there. Some time ago, my wife Cara was lamenting our inability to control the air conditioner in our apartment from afar. We naturally don’t want to leave it on all day with no one home, but ending a long day by walking into a hot, stagnant apartment was no fun either. Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply go to a web site before walking out the door at work and turn the AC on so the apartment would be cool when we arrived?

When our old-school AC broke a month or so ago and we replaced it with a model that had an IR remote, I saw an opportunity – just in time for Cara’s birthday. Using an Arduino with a WiFly shield, an IR led and some code I’d written for a previous project with Bug Labs, I was able to make a unit that pinged a web server to see if one of us had indicated that we’d like to turn the air on, and if so, transmitted the appropriate code via IR.

Because it can be hard to tell how hot it is in Brooklyn from an office in Manhattan, I also added a temperature sensor, pushing its reading up to the server to help us make a more informed decision.

I’m currently cleaning up the code for public consumption, but once I do, I’ll post it with a more complete write-up.

My trip to the Ford Foundation for the Just City forum was a real treat, and came at an ideal time as I firm up my research and early thoughts on JANE and move into determining what exactly it might be and how it will approach encouraging a better, more accessible dialog around urban development. The day was full of luminaries, but to my mind, Van Jones stole the show. Among the most applicable takeaways for me was his idea that narrative is an essential part of brining a group of people together around a particular idea or approach. No matter how strong the related facts may be, we simply don’t make our decisions logically – especially when they involve deeply held beliefs or exist in a polarized environment. I’ve been doing some thinking around how JANE can help pull civic responsiveness issues in as evidence supporting a contributed approach to an urban challenge, but I left asking myself how it might also help citizens construct the compelling narrative that references that evidence.

I really felt lucky to be in a room full of so much good thinking, and perhaps more impressively, track-records of putting that thinking into play. That, and the free lunch was pretty delicious.

I’m very much looking forward to having Mayo in the office for the next couple weeks, and the opportunity for us to work in person together on JANE and everything else in the pipeline. Down the road, J.D. will be up to work on Transitflow (I can’t wait to see where he’s gotten by then,) and we’ll also get Adam back, marking the first time we’ll all have been in the same place.

With the holiday on Monday, the week sort of managed to fly by. Somewhere in there was an unexpected WordPress upgrade, some discussion about a site redesign, and a few updates on Adam and Mayo’s summer class at CIID.

On the primary focus of my efforts, Project JANE, I spent the week trying different approaches for ideating around the opportunities I identified last week. With a new, somewhat nebulous, complex system like this, it can be difficult to find the right place to get started.

There’s the approach where you envision the grand scenario of use, and from there decide on the details. That, however, runs the risk of creating something that fits the one imagined scenario perfectly, but any other scenario not at all.

There’s the approach that tries to break down the problem into more and more granular bits, creating a requirements list that hits every possible need. And then you start to design to that, and find that no idea can possibly clear all the criteria right out of the gate, ending up prematurely shooting down things that have some real potential.

And then there’s the approach where you just sketch bits and pieces and see what comes together from there. This risks spawning something too-fully formed at too early a stage, but so long as you’re careful, can both seed the process and provide hints of something concrete enough to pursue further.

There’s a reason it’s the “Fuzzy Front End,” but it’s all progress and all helps at this stage. I have high hopes that tonight’s Fridays at 7 (my first solo hosting effort) will provide some conversations that help things solidify further.

Mark this consolidated first post up to a busy schedule of getting to know new things and catching up on old things.

Week 0

After packing my things, discovering the exact number of years I’d been at SVA (down to two decimal-points) and taking a long weekend for myself, I was excited to hit the ground running with Adam and Mayo at Urbanscale. They’re a small shop, but with lots of smart friends, and after getting my keys and receiving my brief for Project JANE via a thirty-minute brain dump from Adam I set about getting oriented with each project and introducing myself (via email) to the folks working on them.

In the course of this exercise, it became clear that with collaborators around the globe, Adam’s schedule of frequent travels, and Urbanscale’s significant (percentage-wise) staff increase, we needed a consolidated system for managing projects, so much of the remainder of the abbreviated week was spent getting us organized, and making sure the right people had access to the right things.

Much to my delight and relief (as I’d suggested a major shift in organizational strategy about three hours after joining said organization) everyone dove in quickly and with gusto – todo lists and calendars filled up, and project shells filled out with messages and documents. If nothing else, it made the shape of our distributed workforce that much more visible.

Before heading out for the weekend, I did manage to contribute my thoughts on some of the work Mayo was doing in collaboration with Nordkapp on Urbanflow, and develop my own five-point plan for feeling out the competitive space for Project JANE.

Week 1

With new accounts in place, and all the organizational stuff squared away, I entered Week 1 ready to dive into my research.

Project JANE explores the possibility of unifying the spaces of Community Decision Support, Citizen Responsiveness, and Civic Engagement in a single service offering. I started by looking at examples in each domain to determine what they did well, and what might be improved. I also looked at services offering similar functionality in other domains, things like bug tracking systems for software and customer service systems for companies.

A few definitions. Community Decision Support systems, generally, are GIS-based, quantitative tools that help urban planners find opportunities and plan out various scenarios for growth, plotting them out on a map to serve as a point of discussion. Citizen Responsiveness systems, like the 311 systems and their non-municipal brethren like SeeClickFix provide a single point of access to municipal resources and a venue for bringing immediate issues (like broken streetlights and noisy neighbors) to the attention of appropriate municipal agencies. Rounding out the bunch, Civic Engagement systems are generally forums for either public discussion of policy issues, citizen crowd-sourcing of solutions to larger issues facing a community, or simply a channel for citizens to express their opinions to government officials and, ideally, receive some form of response.

This initial exploration left me with a lot to think about, and a catalog of examples to draw from. I was able to consolidate my findings into a white paper of sorts (some form of which will most likely make its way out down the road). I found quite a few things that worked well in the existing systems, but was generally left with the impression that for their many benefits, the services in each realm were fairly disconnected…

Additionally, I worked with J.D. Hollis on getting Urbanscale set up with the various developer accounts we’ll need as he works on Project LAFAYETTE (which is currently somewhat under wraps but very, very cool.) I also got a first look at the Urbanflow documentation, and saw the video get progressively tighter and closer to finished as the week went on.

Week 2

Stepping back from the initial research for a moment, I was able to start considering some of the opportunities and underlying principles suggested by what I’d learned.

One of the biggest insights? That all three types of systems are very much related to more responsive governance, just on different timeframes. The immediate issues of the Citizen Responsiveness systems, in aggregate, are the inspiration and evidence for the larger policy changes and ideas discussed in Civic Engagement systems. The ideas and approaches that rise to the top are (or rather, should often be) the goals and priorities of the development and growth modeled through Community Decision Support systems. The results of those long-term plans, once enacted, naturally influence the immediate issues of the future.

I’m starting to see the outlines of a system that allows information, opinion and debate to flow more naturally through these three realms, and in a way that’s standardized and accountable. Such a system will need to reach citizens where they already are, encourage reasoned arguments from anyone while recognizing the experience that domain experts bring to the table, highlight what’s possible and who’s accountable for making sure it happens, and ultimately make the whole thing transparent enough that citizens recognize the effect their input had, even if their specific suggestion isn’t ultimately implemented.

My expectation is that there are a set of patterns and best practices that can be developed around these goals, if not the framework for a whole system, which might integrate nicely with some of our other projects. I’m looking forward to translating the implications of this early research into some initial design directions.

In other realms, I finally met the folks from GROUNDlab who’ve been working on Project PERRY. They’ve been helping make a very promising idea into proof-of-concept reality, and Adam and I were very impressed with the video they brought along, showing an (albeit un-optimized and exploded) working version of a farecard with a phantom-powered e-paper display. They also left us with an Arduino-controlled version of the display to play with, and of course I couldn’t resist digging in and figuring out how close we could get to adding a dollar sign symbol on the segmented display.

Week 2 saw a constant flow of emails with ever shorter lists of tweaks to the Urbanflow document and video, as Mayo helped shepherd both to completion from his location on the ground in Helsinki. It also saw Adam off at Eyeo in Minneapolis, then back briefly, before heading back out on the road for a solid month in Marseille, Copenhagen and Korea.

And in non Urbanscale news, parts arrived for a secret personal project, to be revealed (if all goes well) in a little over a week. More on that to come.

Naturally, I didn’t do this alone, and so I’d like to throw some thank-you’s out to the various people who helped me along.

Of course, it all starts with WordPress, which I scarcely need to link to, but will anyway. People love to talk about the sometimes frustrating process of bending it into a custom CMS, but the job’s become vastly easier over the past couple years thanks to the development team, and is always well-supported by the forums.

After many false starts at designing the site, I finally came to terms with the fact that I don’t claim to be a graphic designer, and could cut myself a break and start with a template. The lovely and talented Kelli Anderson pointed me toward the “Portfolio” theme by Organic Themes, and with a little tweaking of the visual design, and a little more tweaking of the functionality, I was in a pretty good place.

Russ Maschmeyer encouraged me away from plugins for a slideshow on the portfolio pages, and Marcus Schaefer pointed out the I could use the WordPress Attachments plugin, along with a modified version of the jFlow jQuery slideshow that was already included in the theme’s header to easily achieve the same effect.

And of course, feedback from a variety of folks, especially my wife Cara, who proofread the write-ups I created at various late hours after getting the functionally of the site down.