Even though I shouldn’t own a car, I do, and as every car owner in NYC knows, dealing with alternate-side parking is a hassle.

That, combined with my recent itch to write a small mobile app, has lead me to the following idea:  the “Dude, Where’s My Car?” app for mobile.   Here’s what it will do:

• When I park my car, I’ll open the app, and it will prompt me to enter where I’ve parked.  I’ll enter “Warren” under “Street” and “Smith & Hoyt” under “Between”.  Or maybe I’ll click on a map.  This seems like a silly step, but if you’re like me, it’ll come in handy four days later when you forget where you parked.
• The app home screen will show the car’s location, either in text or map form.
• Then, the app will query the Alternate Side Parking Calendar, and show if alternate side is in effect for the next few days.
• For bonus points, it will send me a text or email the night before I need to move the car.

I plan on trying to make this for blackberry, since that’s how I roll, but of course it would be sexier on the iPhone.  Maybe I’ll try out PhoneGap and kill two birds with one stone.

(I know some people have already been thinking about this problem, so I may be able to recruit some help)

This past weekend, Phil Ashlock and I headed down to DC to participate in TransparencyCamp, a BarCamp event put on by the Sunlight Foundation.  We spent two days with ~200 open government and transparency advocates from all sectors — government, non-profit, tech, etc.  All in all, it was a pretty amazing event — great people and good sessions.  We learned about some cool projects, met a ton of people, spread the word about TOPP, and basically got our transparency on.  Here are some of my really quick takeaways, in no particular order:

Tech people love twitter. The whole weekend was basically a giant twitter party.  Walking around any session, pretty much every single person’s screen looked like this:

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In case you’re wondering, that is TweetDeck, an all-powerful Twitter client.  Using TweetDeck, you can follow conversations along twitter hashtags just like you’d follow conversation in an IRC channel.  Amazingly, the ~200 people at TCamp pushed #tcamp09 to be the #1 Twitter search term for the weekend.  So every session was two conversations at once — one in person and the other via tweets.  The tweet stream also served as live, distributed note-taking, and is probably more rich than the wiki in terms of content.

Open Government and Transparency are a really big deal. If you don’t know, now you know.  This was evidenced by the big, high-quality crowd — folks from major federal agencies, the Obama campaign, Recovery.gov, Tim O’Reilly, Craig Newmark, just to name a few — and by the tangible sense of community and excitement.  The train has left the station and everybody is along for the ride. Andrew Hoppin is breaking new ground at the NYS Senate, Sunlight is driving the transparency bus (to continue the transit metaphors), and events are happening at rapid-fire pace (like Government 2.0 Camp next month).

Governments are just learning how to handle it all. One session was called “Drinking from the Firehose,” where the firehose is the potentially overwhelming stream of constituent feedback that can come in once you open the spigot.  For agencies that are already under-staffed and generally not as web-comfortable as the private sector, this can be a lot to handle. Getting it right can require a pretty significant re-thinking of government->citizen communication — most importantly, this means managing constituent expectations, and empowering more people in an agency to be communicators.  Other potential solutions included encouraging more citizen-to-citizen communcations (w/ gov acting as a router), prioritizing questions and responding in bulk (like NH power did via twitter during the big winter storm), etc. etc.

Many “government 2.0 sites” are actually rethinking core concepts of government. I am no political scientist, but it’s clear that technology is leading the way in exploring twists on representative democracy as we know it.  Projects like WhiteHouse2, MetaGovernment and YourOwnDemocracy are exploring new ways of employing citizen preference (voting) to impact decision-making.

Transparency has many levels, and starting at the source is the best. For example, Recovery.gov is collecting and aggregating info from all recipients of federal stimulus/bailout money.  They will then be republishing it all in machine readable format.  However, this introduces a layer of abstraction, and in strict terms, an opportunity for corruption.  Transparency advocates push for access to data at the source — in this case, directly from each individual recipient.  This is, of course, not practical at the moment, and many new transparency-related services are doing the hard work of transforming the data to make it accessible (in a geoserver-ish kind of way).

There are many policy barriers to transparency, and they’re not just technical. The actual government employees at tcamp expounded on the internal bureaucratic hurdles to transparency.  While the larger tech community is tackling the strictly technical issues (such as formats and standards), many of those inside government are working to reform 20th century policies that make transparency difficult to achieve.

Government transparency and civic engagement go hand in hand. One line I overheard that I really liked was: “a ‘push’ government can encourage relevant contributions from citizens by providing relevant data.”  I think there’s something really powerful in that, and somewhere in there is a core idea for TOPP and TOPP Labs.  If we are interested in encouraging citizen participation and empowering individuals, the opening up of government data will be a core component.  It’s my theory that there’s a huge latent demand for participation, but that people just don’t know how or don’t have the right ways to engage.  The proliferation of civic data that’s on the way should provide ample seed for interesting citizen engagement projects.

Distributed systems need a way to cooperate. Of course, a huge challenge here, that’s not unique to government — information and accounts are siloed across systems.  A lot of the conversations at TCamp focused on ways to share data across systems.  There was talk of OpenID, OAuth, microformats, DiSo, semantic web, and all the others.  One of the more interesting presentations was on the potential civic uses for the semantic web.  Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack.us keeps a piece of the Linked Open Data cloud in his data store, and can do pretty impressive queries of distributed data regarding federal legislation, lawmakers, campaign contributions, etc.

Ok, that’s about it for my little brain dump, for now.  I’ll leave you with some photos of the event after the jump:

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Opening session.  Photo by Avelino Maestas

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Craig Newmark delivers opening address.  Photo by Avelino Maestas.

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A typical session.  Photo by Corbett3000.

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The session board.  Photo by Corbett3000.

Clay Johnson of Sunlight Labs working the board like the commodities market.  Photo by notbrucelee.

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Smaller session.  Photo by Corbett3000.
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People tweeting.  Photo by notbrucelee.
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Some familiar faces.  Photo by Avelino Maestas.
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Phil trying to stay awake during a session.  Photo by Avelino Maestas.

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Session notes from “Drinking from the Firehose”.  Photo by forumone.
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Another session board.  Photo by Andrew Macurak.

For your reading pleasure, the Broadsheet Wide theme for the Vienna RSS reader.

Frannie and I are ready to sell our car, Dudley.  He’s a great car, and we love him, but we just don’t use him enough to justify the expense.  If you’re interested or know anyone who might be, let me know

I didn’t make a website for this car like I did last time, but opted instead to post it on cars.com.

This week, we launched the new, improved GothamSchools.  GothamSchools is the latest media / advocacy initiative from The Open Planning Project, and our first foray into the world of education.  We’ve got a great team of reporters in Philissa Cramer, Elizabeth Green, and Kelly Vaughan, and the new site website was put together by the talented Chris Abraham and Phil Ashlock.

GothamSchools the news outlet is just the beginning; look for more as we build up community and tools around this initiative.

For a while now, I’ve been using Chandler to keep track of my to-dos.  Chandler is a semi-historic open source project which I’ve been following ever since I read Dreaming in Code (and in many ways, it’s saga parallels ours at The Open Planning Project with our work on OpenPlans)  I’ve been rooting for it through the last several releases, and have eagerly anticipated updates.

So, I was intrigued when I came across this post, which compares a handful of new to-do management applications for Mac.  My first reaction was “this field is getting pretty crowded,” and my second was “interesting to see that Chandler’s not on that list.”  Finally, my third reaction, after having checked out some of the tools, was “wow, these are just like Chandler, only better.”

Maybe it’s because it takes forever for it to load up, or that it takes forever for it to shut down, or perhaps it’s the fact that it heats up my computer and makes my fan go into overdrive every time I use it, but Chandler just hasn’t been working very well for me.  It’s a shame, really, because the project has such a long history, and is backed by so many good intentions.  But when it comes to the final level of polish and the feeling that the program gives you when you use it, it’s just not there yet.

Of the applications featured in the comparison, the two I looked closely at were OmniFocus and Things.  OmniFocus is the more powerful of the two, and is actually quite similar to Chander in many ways (both have “Clean up” button in exactly the same place). Both are proprietary applications that come at a price (OmniFocus is $79 and Things is $49), but I’m not an open source hard-liner (I’m typing this on a Mac); I’m willing to pay for software if it actually makes my life easier, though of course I prefer to use and support open source tools.

I’ve been using Things for a few days now, and in terms of usability and addictiveness it’s got Chandler beat hands down (at least for my needs).  It’s still pre-release, but the fundamental experience is very good, and the really important details are done right.  It does the things I need it to and doesn’t try to do the rest.  Creating, organizing, and viewing tasks is quick and easy, and the views they present me with let me focus on what I’m working on at the moment.

Above: Chandler’s main screen

Above: OmniFocus’ main screen

Above: Things’ main screen

So, the question is: how come these new applications are better (or seem better to me) than Chandler?  Offhand, I can think up a few potential reasons:

• Chandler paved the way for many innovative features in task management (e.g., turning tasks into calendar items).  Not particularly likely.

And on to the more likely reasons:

• Chandler is too complicated, and these other applications do less, better.  Yes.
• Chandler couldn’t cross the chasm between early interested techies and the mainstream market.  Seems true.  Interestingly, Things seems to be starting with the mainstream market and doing well.
• Chandler had too big a team and too much funding.  This much seems to be widely understood.  Looking through the project wiki, one can find years worth of theories and plans, but somehow those were never translated into actual, usable product, whereas Things was produced by a small, balanced team including just two developers.

“Release early and often” is a phrase often heard in software development, and is more like a mantra for most web development projects.  The idea being that it’s better to get something “out there” in a simple or reduced form, rather than wait and wait and wait for your grand plan to come together. (In Getting Real, 37signals calls this “half, not half-assed“)

Well, this applies equally well to projects outside the software realm, and there’s a great example right here in Brooklyn.  Anyone who walked over the Brooklyn Bridge this summer (possibly to see the waterfalls) probably noticed a new patch of park on an otherwise ignorable patch of land jutting out into the river.

This is, of course, the first public taste of Brooklyn Bridge Park project, called Pier 1.  It’s a temporary park, on the nearest edge of what will become the first major section of the park. It’s highly visible, and perfectly timed to capitalize on the buzz around the waterfalls.

A few quotes from Going Coastal demonstrate the power of this approach:

“Since popping up with little fanfare June 26 in Brooklyn Heights on a sliver of the future waterfront park’s construction site, a temporary playground at the edge of Pier 1 is giving the public its first real sense of what the long-delayed development will bring to the Big Apple.”

I love the “with little fanfare” bit — no need to make a grand launch; just put it out there and let people find it.  And of course…

“… critics of the long-delayed park project are still questioning why it took the city and state so long to offer a first glimpse of the breathtaking waterfront access the planned 85-acre park will bring.”

It sounds like a change of administration was what was needed to get things moving in the “getting real” direction;

“Even the development’s biggest critics agree that the project only gathered steam in November after Regina Meyer, a longtime Brooklyn planning director, was appointed president of the state-city Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corp.

She replaced Wendy Leventer, a Pataki administration holdover who was fired in March 2007 after the Post reported the agency at that time had spent $16.5 million over the previous five years with little to show expect mounting legal fees and continuously changing project renderings.

But this past March, construction kicked off despite there only being enough government funding to build about two-thirds of the park. Including $6.1 million recently donated by the City Council and Borough President Marty Markowitz’s office, the project’s current budget now totals $231.1 million.

Meyer said she felt it was important to finally get the project going and then lobby to fill the remaining budget shortfall at a later date.” [emphasise mine]

This is really the important part, and where the power of the “early-and-often” approach is really evident.  Instead of tweaking the plans forever, Meyer decided to just go and build something (anything!), to show progress and give people a glimpse of how awesome things will be.

And man, it is awesome.  The photo above really doesn’t do it justice, but the view from the new (temporary, mind you!) Pier 1 is incredible, and it really opens up the waterfront in an entirely new way.

In doing some photo hunting for a side project, I came across this gem of a photo on Flickr.

Riding the subway all over the city, I often think about the fact that most great subway moments (and many great city moments, for that matter) go unrecorded. Perhaps this is part of the beauty of it — there are only participants; no watchers — but I often wish I had a camera built into my eyes to catch the great little moments that happen almost every day.

Musicians on the train are a real special treat; I love the fact that for just a few minutes, perhaps just the distance between two stops, a little concert takes place.  For that short period of time, riders goes from being disconnected strangers to inadvertent partners, with feet tapping and heads nodding.

This photo has an almost Rockwell-esque quality to it, and you’ve gotta love the angry glare from the woman in the corner.

What do you see? I honestly can’t think of a reasonable explanation…

In the spirit of blogging all the cool stuff we’re doing at TOPP, I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Park(ing) Day NYC. Park(ing) Day is a global event, originally conceived by awesome SF-based arts collective REBAR, where for a single day, regular parking spaces are “leased” for use as temporary public parks. This year’s Park(ing) Day will be held, worldwide, on September 19th.

Here’s the description from the national Park(ing) day website:

On November 16th, 2005, REBAR opened eyes worldwide by transforming a metered parking spot into a park. Locating a site that was underserved by public outdoor space, we installed a small, temporary park that provided nature, seating, and shade. By our calculations, we provided 24,000 square-foot-minutes of public open space that afternoon. See the original PARK(ing) video!

Since the initial PARK(ing) project was created we’ve been contacted by people worldwide. What began as a simple, playful idea has become a lively and visible symbol of the desire to reprogram the street and increase public open space in cities all over the planet.

TOPP produced the website that supports Park(ing) Day NYC, working with Transportation Alternatives, who is organizing and promoting the event here in NYC. TA is giving out mini-grants of $200 each for Park(ing) spot makers, so apply now. This year’s event is also co-sponsored by the EyeBeam Art & Technology Center, who will hopefully encourage some creative submissions.

(For you web geeks out there, the Park(ing) Day NYC site was made using Pylons and jQuery, and was built using the codebase we originally created for Block Party NYC)

Be sure to check out these videos, which are the best way to get the feel for the event.

The original Park(ing) experiment in 2005:

The first Park(ing) Day in SF in 2006:

and Park(ing) Day 2007 here in NYC: