Hi! I am Nick Grossman - urbanist, technologist and neighborhood handyman. I'm interested in the intersection of cities and the Internet. At work, I'm Managing Director of Civic Commons and Open Cities Evangelist at OpenPlans. I live in Boston and have an amazing wife and two great kids. This is my Big Boy Blog. More about me, me, me →

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Introducing OpenPlans, and the evolution of a brand

After many moons of plotting and scheming, yesterday we announced our organizational rebranding: The organization formerly known as The Open Planning Project (or TOPP) is now OpenPlans.  I am excited, and I think this is a welcome development. For years, there has been mass confusion (chaos! pandemonium!) around our name.  Our emails were @openplans.org, our [...]

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 [...]

Melkjug Fluid Icon

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

Map drawing UX is still too hard

At work today, we are exploring the process of drawing routes on a map, thinking ahead to a few upcoming projects involving bike planning.  So Sonali set up a Google MyMap and asked a few of us to mark our routes to work.  In a nutshell, it was basically a flop, with two out of [...]

TOPP @ Green Desk

This week, TOPP moved into additional, (maybe) temporary office space, to alleviate some of the crowding at our office in the West Village.  We were looking for a place that was convenient, comfortable, and most of all, available immediately (backstory is that we’ve been basically sitting on top of each other at our W. 12th [...]