Making cities easier to use

I always have a hard time explaining what we do at The Open Planning Project.  The front page of our website reads: “TOPP is a catalyst.  We empower civil society through software, media, and smart urban policy.”  While this makes sense if you think about it for a while, when I first say it to people I’m usually met with blank stares.  I don’t mean to dig on TOPP — a lot of effort went into writing that tagline, and believe me, earlier versions were more abstract and less punchy.

Prior to this current version, we had a different tagline: “Virtual tools for real-world change.”  That’s what our t-shirts still say on them, and I don’t mind it.  It has a skyline above it, implying a connection with cities, which I like.

But still, I don’t think we have a compelling enough elevator pitch — a description that doesn’t take five minutes and a walk-through of our org chart to explain.

So recently, I’ve been trying out something new.  I’m experimenting with the following explanation:

(standard disclaimer)  “We’re a non-profit software company; yeah, it’s a bit strange, I know.”

“We build software that makes cities easier to use.  You know, like, making it easier to get around, to interface with your government, and to connect with your neighbors.”

This morning, I tried this on a friend at the gym, and I got an “Oh, cool!  You mean like public transportation?  My friend in Seattle was telling me about GPS on buses there — how come we don’t have that in NYC?”  Bingo.

So, I’m going to test this out a little more.  Making cities easier to use.  I like it.  I just updated my twitter description with that; we’ll see if anyone notices.

To get a little more specific, here are some of the questions I think we’re trying to answer that fall under this larger goal:

How can we make it easier to…

  • get around? (ideally by foot, bike, or transit)
  • interface with government? (who reps me? who supports me?  how can I help?  how can I be heard?)
  • connect with neighbors? (who lives on my block?  what do we have in common?  how can we help each other?)
  • be involved in shaping the future? (combining the two above: connecting with neighbors and interfacing with gov)

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to make a city easier to use, that lots of creative projects (many of them NYC-based startups) are already addressing:

How can we make it easier to…

Given all of these questions and more, it’s highly likely that Making cities easier to use is still too broad; but there’s no question that it’s easier to explain, which is a start.

And for those of you struggling with similar issues of tagline-choosing, see Seb’s brand-spanking-new conjoint.py decision-making tool, which OpenGeo has been using recently during its own tagline discussion.

// Photo of crumpled city map by Emanuele Pizzolorusso via MoCo loco

Jan 15, 2010

0 Comments

Cities, Strategy, Vision

Knowing the tone of the room

One of the toughest things I’ve encountered, as I attend meetings, speak on panels, do interviews, and go to conferences, is that you never quite know what the tone of the room will be like until you get there.  In other words, there are always a ton of different approaches you can take to a conversation, in terms of what you talk about and how you say it.  And I never seem to really know what the right one is until after it’s already happened.

I’m thinking about it today because this afternoon I did a short interview with Rick Karr (from PBS’s Blueprint for America, among other things) about open transit data and real-time bus & train information in NYC, for an upcoming episode of the Engadget Show.  Of course, now that the interview’s over, I’m thinking of all the witty things I could have said but didn’t.  But more importantly, thinking back, I wish I had thought harder about the audience and intention of the interview a bit more before going on air.  (Hat tip to Nick for suggesting exactly this a few days ago, but apparently it wasn’t quite enough.)

We talk a lot about open data, and open transit data in particular.  By and large, our audience consists of transit geeks, policy wonks, or bureaucrats (I mean all of those as terms of endearment); in each case, we dive into the policy and technical details of opening transit data.  That’s the mode I’ve been in: white papers, RFIs, formal letters, panel talks, etc.  Today’s interview was really for the consumer electronics crowd, and probably deserved a more gadgety/fun tone and emphasis than what I lead with.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out, and meanwhile I’ll continue on my quest to suss out the tone of the room before I get there…

// image courtesy of Best Online Stuff.  No relevance to this post, except that it was on the first page of google image results for “tone of the room“.

Jan 12, 2010

0 Comments

Meta

Optional scope contracts

For an upcoming project at TOPP, we’re talking about setting up an optional scope contract [PDF] — where we specify the time, cost and quality, but leave the actual scope of work open.  This approach has many advantages, which I’ll just quote from Beck & Cleal’s document:

  • Customers can change their minds
  • Suppliers aren’t encouraged to sacrifice quality as soon as something goes wrong
  • Customers’ and suppliers’ interests are contractually aligned
  • The knowledge that both parties gain during the project can influence the finished product.

In my experience so far, it has been much easier to set up agreements like this in the private + nonprofit sectors than in the public sector.  Typically, public sector contracts must begin with detailed requirements (beginning with an RFP then a final scope of work), to ensure that the requesting agency doesn’t get screwed over.  The problem with this approach, of course, is that you don’t always know what you need at the beginning of a project, or to rephrase, that’s when you know exactly the least about what you’ll be making.

So my question for you, internet, is have you had experience making optional scope contracts work in the public sector?

// thanks Nate for turning me on to this idea at last year’s Nonprofit DevSummit

Dec 18, 2009

0 Comments

Biz

jPlayer sprites SVG

For a little side project, I’m using jPlayer, a nice jQuery-based audio player.   I wanted to skin the buttons a to suit my project, and while jPlayer does support jQuery ThemeRoller skins, I liked the basic look and feel of the standard jPlayer controls.  So, I just traced the default sprites in Illustrator in order to recolor them.  For other jPlayer developers, you can download the source SVG  here, and tweak away.

Dec 12, 2009

0 Comments

Design, Javascript

This makes my heart melt

food

Today, Theo took his first ever bite of solid food.  I get all welled up looking at pictures of him while I’m at work.

Dec 11, 2009

3 Comments

Life

Is _____ for you?

I get way too much spam in my inbox, even just counting things I’ve signed up for myself.  Most of it I delete, but today’s email from CoTweet stood out, and is worth mentioning.

A while back I signed up for CoTweet, just to check it out — nutshell: CoTweet lets you collaboratively monitor and manage multiple Twitter accounts — but after my initial exploration I didn’t go back to it.  There may have been a reason, there may not have been.

So, CoTweet, noticing my cold start, sent me an email, as any customer-aware and responsive web service should:

Subject: Is CoTweet for you?

Hi Nick,

We’ve noticed that no one has logged in to the @nickgrossman Twitter account through CoTweet lately.

CoTweet is not for everyone. It’s designed for teams who are managing the front-line of the real-time web for their organizations.

….

No other tool allows you to engage customers one-on-one like CoTweet does.

….

They seem to have struck a nice balance between being self-promoting (“No other tool allows…”), while being self-aware and honest (“CoTweet is not for everyone”).  In particular, I found the ordering of the argument to be effective.  Here was my thought process:

Cotweet: “We’ve noticed that no one has logged in…”

Me: “Yeah, yeah, I’m busy” (reaches to delete)

CoTweet: “CoTweet is not for everyone”

Me: “Ah nice, they’re not trying to just straight up sell me.  I appreciate that”

CoTweet: “It’s designed for teams who are managing the front-line of the real-time web for their organizations”

Me: “Oh wait, that’s me”  (clicks sign in link)

So, thinking about my own work, there are two takeaways here:  1) make sure you follow up on cold starts (lord knows we don’t do enough of this with some of our projects), and 2) when you do, phrase it in a way that’s disarming, honest, and helpful.

(looking forward to the email I get after I don’t use it for another 3 weeks)

Dec 9, 2009

0 Comments

Copywriting, Design

Scribefire is so awesome

I can’t say enough about ScribeFire.  It’s a Firefox add-on that gives you an in-window blogging client.  Here are just a few reasons why it’s awesome:

  1. You’re blogging from within Firefox, and you can move among webpages while keeping your blog post editing window open.  This comes in really handy when looking for references, quoting things, finding pictures, etc.  It also makes it really easy to fire off quick posts — no need to open up a new window, log in, etc., etc.
  2. When you copy something to your clipboard, it’s automatically pasted to the “insert link” dialog.  So, for example, you go to a webpage (while keeping your editor open, see #1 above) and copy the URL from the URL bar.  Then you highlight your text and click the “add link” button.  Bingo!  The URL is already pasted there, and all you have to do is press OK.  Sweet.
  3. You can write to multiple blogs from the same place.  Very nice.  Also a bit dangerous, as you could conceivably post to the wrong blog very easily.  Hasn’t happened to me yet, but I do have a lingering uneasy feeling about it.

So, if you blog and you use Firefox, get Scribefire.  Go get it now.  I promise you’ll thank me.

Dec 3, 2009

1 Comment

Tools

Transit: uniter or divider?

Today’s post on Infrastructurist about the D-Train Murder had a line that caught my eye:

Cramming the population of a city like New York into a maze of underground cars creates a forced melting pot that’s a perfect breeding ground for class and race divisions.

There’s no question that the NYC subway is a forced melting pot — but it’s the assertion that it’s a breeding ground for class and race divisions that I take issue with.  In fact, I’ll say it’s the exact opposite.  Most (all?) of the above-ground city is actually divided by race and class.  It’s the subway where we all come together each day; the subway is perhaps the only place where people from all races, classes, and neighborhoods really mix.  In my experience, that is not cause for further division; rather, it’s a uniting force that gives us shared experiences on a human level.

One of the commenters on the Infrastructurist post summed it up nicely:

I think the necessity of sharing space with strangers is what makes cities the diverse, creative, wealth-producing places that they are. Far from being a necessary evil, it is the most distinctive feature of urban life. The elimination of this feature was one aspect of modernist city planning, but we reject that now. So we want mass transit for the type of civic interaction it creates, not just for sustainability and practicality.

Well said.

(Photo my moriza on Flickr)

Nov 24, 2009

3 Comments

Cities, transit

New theme, and it’s slightly less simple

During Theo’s morning nap today, I updated this blog’s theme.   I’m going to attempt to start using the blog more regulalry, as sort of an “open lab notebook,” and (in the true spirit of procrastination) figured I’d start by updating the theme.

So here it is; I’ve ditched by previous Undesign for more of a design design.  I took the very nice looking Simplicity theme by Digital Visions, and adjusted it a bit for my purposes.  The resulting theme is available here if you’re interested.

Voila!

Nov 21, 2009

0 Comments

Meta

Melkjug Fluid Icon

If you use Melkjug as a Fluid app, like I do, then you’ll love this:


(Melkjug fluid icon)

Oct 15, 2009

1 Comment

Design

,