April 30th, 2010 by Jason Lally
Recently, we’ve has been doing some thinking about how to upgrade the public meetings to go completely wireless/cordless. I know this may sound like a silly notion, but we are looking to reduce the amount of friction for planning and holding public meetings and collecting robust feedback.
We currently run most of our meetings using web-connected laptops, a note-taker, a facilitator, keypads, and lots of tape and power cords. That last part is what we want to get rid of. We have been using AnyWare (an internally developed brainstorming tool) to collect feedback from a large group of people and poll on issues on the fly. Our interest in this is to reduce the level of public meeting fatigue by making the meetings iterative and productive toward a set of next steps or actions. We want to reduce the cost per participant in a public process while increasing the quality of the feedback and interaction. As such, our goal is not to remove the public meeting altogether but to augment it with innovative web applications that can help move a meeting toward real results and lower the amount of recording, synthesis and reporting that normally happens after a meeting. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: civic engagement, iterative, Planning, public meetings
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March 30th, 2010 by Jason Lally
AnyWare is a project I’ve been working on closely for a while at PlaceMatters. It is a web-based tool to brainstorm and evaluate ideas both in real time and over periods of time by large groups of people. It is a definite work in progress, but we are ready to begin letting a certain set of users play with the tools and help us build something better. We developed this tool to help scale up the level of participation that could happen during a planning process. However, it could be just as useful to a Fortune 500 company, a neighborhood association, or an advocacy group. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: anyware, civic engagement, placematters, public participation
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March 17th, 2010 by Jason Lally
I’ve been following the Sunlight Foundation for a little bit now and they are currently doing some great work around government and transparency. There has been a much larger, if not perfect, commitment to transparency under the Obama administration. For one example, go to http://www.recovery.gov to see where all the Recovery Act money is going. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: government, opengov, publicequalsonline, sunlight foundation, Transparency
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December 12th, 2009 by Jason Lally
This post is not just about Philadelphia, but it is a little sentimental. This post is really about place, and what makes a place. I’ve recently returned home to Philadelphia to visit my family and celebrate my mother’s birthday, giving rise to a number of thoughts on what makes a place.
I realized immediately that I wanted to put my thoughts into words when I walked up to the gate at DIA and saw the word “Philadelphia”. Just the word gives me comfort; I like the way it’s spelled, the way it sounds, and all the memories it conjures. This is when I realized that place is more than a location. Place is all the experiences, smells, tastes, sights, and sounds. Place is love lost and love found, lessons learned, laughter and tears. Place is a movie and blanket on a cold day in your downtown apartment; place is a kiss on Walnut Street; place is children’s laughter on an early fall day in Rittenhouse Square. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: philadelphia, philly
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September 22nd, 2009 by Jason Lally
The NYTimes, this weekend reported on better than expected ridership on the Phoenix light rail. The Times points out that the 33,000 average daily riders come primarily from weekend riders looking to get out to the bars and restaurants. This comes as little surprise to me, as many light rail systems, including the one in Denver, far surpassed initial estimates of ridership. This story has played out over and over again in cities like Minneapolis, Houston, and Charlotte. The Overhead has more on these underestimates.
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Tags: high speed, light rail, phoenix, Planning, Transit
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