Hackable City: Providence

I’ve been meaning to post this article from the NY Times Architecture Issue for a while, about Guerrilla Gardening, “the cultivation of someone
else’s land without permission.” I think our social services non-profits should train people in this subversive spread of growing things.

Guerrilla Gardening in London - Richard Reynolds - NYTimes.com

Just after sunset on one of the first mild nights of spring, Richard Reynolds parked his hatchback near a traffic circle in the London neighborhood of Hoxton. Tied to his roof were a potted honeysuckle and a dozen box hedge plants, spilling out of garbage bags. Trays of bright white Paris daisies filled the trunk, and cartons of variegated ivy were wedged in the passenger seat. Hipsters drank indifferently outside a nearby pub.

The car was swiftly unstuffed. Soon Reynolds and five accomplices were over a short black fence and onto a small, squalid crescent of land at a bend in the sidewalk. They were ankle-deep in food wrappers and beer bottles and the spindly overgrowth of a bullying bush that Reynolds — bent over, wearing work gloves and high black rubber boots — started clipping fervidly.

In a small but worthy step, Providence has posted a site Providence Sunshine with tax adjustments, received by individuals and corporations against their property taxes. Usually these are small adjustments for small reasons - hardship, administrative error, hospitalization - but it is good to see them opened up. Its obvious that this is being fed manually, as the last update is from 2/19/09. The site lacks RSS or any other export functions, and has no link to the Property database, but this could easily be accomplished through a mashup off the Plat/Lot number.

Super interesting post from O’Reilly’s Vanessa Fox on the (un)findability of government data, which is an essential underpinning of the MashableCity effort. Although Fox’s focus in the article is on search, I think there is also a role here for a concept browsing approach that unifies data from the user perspective, rather than silo-ing it along government agency lines.

From O’Reilly Radar:

Thursday on this blog, Congressman Honda asked, “how can congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?” He noted that “A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.” He asked for input on what web 2.0 features he should add to his website to take advantage of today’s online world.

Full article here…

In California, a Massachusetts native has come up with a novel way to take whole cities and counties over into alternative energy sourcing using a technique called Community Choice Aggregation, or CCA. It requires state legislation to enable, but once it happens, municipalities have an effective way to negotiate and buy their power from any source, using the power company as a carrier, rather than a monopoly supplier.

Power Play - Paul Fenn - PG&E | Fast Company

Pacific Gas & Electric proudly calls itself the “greenest big utility in America.” The California company has relatively low emissions, thanks to a mix of hydro and nuclear power. “We’re investing in renewables like crazy,” says Robert Parkhurst, PG&E’s earnest, bespectacled environmental-policy manager. “We’re trying to walk the talk here.” But PG&E has struggled to meet a state target of 20% certified renewable energy — wind, geothermal, solar, biomass — by 2010; it’s currently delivering just 12%. Meanwhile, it’s ramping up investments in natural gas, and when Californians flick the switch at home, chances are it’s still linked to a fossil-fueled power plant.

Activist-turned-entrepreneur Paul Fenn wants to rewire that circuit. Fenn has spent his career fighting to green our energy supply by transforming the industry’s structure, creating Community Choice Aggregation, or CCA, which lets a locality take over the sourcing of its own power. CCA may be reaching a tipping point in California: More than 50 communities, representing 20% of the state’s privately provided electric load, are in the process of implementing the program, aiming to deliver 100% renewable electricity in Marin County, for instance, and 51% in San Francisco. “The whole point is to prove that a major city can go to 51% green in a very short period of time without any increase in rates,” Fenn says. “If we can, this should spread virally.”

“I’m saying that seniority is not an appropriate way to manage the assignment of teachers based on what we know in the 21st century,” he said. “It’s no longer about teacher preferences. It’s about whether the teacher is the best match for that particular student.”

With that strongly worded statement, Peter McWalters, the retiring RI Education Commissioner, let the Providence School district know that teacher vacancies must be filled based on qualifications rather than seniority, and that “bumping” of less senior teachers in favor of more senior ones will cease. This is a major victory for the common sense idea that a school principal and its community should have the right (and the responsibility) to determine how to build their educational team.

There will be a lot of noise about this from the teacher’s union, which has yet to offer up a clear argument as to why seniority should trump all - already the comments list on this Providence Journal article is the longest I’ve ever seen. What the union hasn’t accepted is that, until they remove their contract provisions that work counter to student achievement at the individual school level, they won’t be able to credibly work with parents to hold schools and their administrations accountable for the resources that will produce better results.

You may have read Good to Great, a classic business book by Jim Collins that examines through research why some companies “take off to greatness” after many years of mediocrity, while others lag behind. If you haven’t read it, you should, it is applicable far beyond traditional for-profit businesses. I was freshly reminded of Collin’s tenets for transformation while reading this piece in the Providence Journal “Hope High School nearly triples its reading scores”. It is the first of a three part series on how “Hopeless High”, with a historic dropout rate of above 50%, is slowly stabilizing and succeeding at its job of giving urban teens a decent environment and access to learning.

I see Good to Great’s findings woven throughout Hope’s ongoing story. [Read more →]

The FabLabs around the world do amazing work in opening up technology to the people. I’m proud to be supporting it’s establishment in PVD.

From Providence Business News

PROVIDENCE – The nonprofit community arts group AS220 is planning to join a high-profile Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative that will bring a hands-on high-tech workshop to the city. Backers hope it will become a new center for innovation in Providence.

David Ortiz, AS220’s development director, confirmed today in a brief telephone interview with Providence Business News that plans are underway for the organization to partner with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms in the creation of a Fab Lab here. The city’s tech community has been buzzing about the idea for months.

‘Hacker’ Altman takes mystery out of electronics - Providence Business News

“Hacking, the way I describe it, is learning about a technology, exchanging it, and sharing it,” said Altman, who is an Artist in Residency this month at AS220, the nonprofit community arts center in downtown Providence. As Altman sees it, hackers are like accountants – there are good ones and bad ones – but they perform an important service by finding and demonstrating vulnerabilities in the technologies we depend on.

Altman himself is a hacker extraordinaire. An electrical engineer by training, he is best known as the inventor of TV-B-Gone, a $20 electronic keychain device that is programmed with the codes for thousands of TVs and thus can turn off almost any set – a blessing for those exhausted by the numbing drone of CNN at an airport terminal or a Laundromat. He also writes for the do-it-yourself electronics magazine Make, and was invited to spend August in Providence by local tech guru Brian Jepson, an AS220 board member and an editor at Make.

This caught my eye when it turned up in my alumni newspaper. Dan Schultz’s idea for combining hyperlocal and traditional journalism sources isn’t unique, but the Knight Ridder Foundation’s initiative to find and seed fund the next generation in news is.

Assembled quotes from Carnegie Mellon Today

Schultz brainstorms with his classmate Ian Anderson to develop an idea of a news-media Web site, one that would allow users to pull up a screen and draw a circle around any town or region on a map. From within a circle, the Web site would return all relevant news stories.He also envisions all those returned stories coming from an eclectic group of sources: mainstream media, citizen journalists, Web logs, and Web news systems—like a search engine for news crossed with global
positioning system mapping technology. In his proposal, he describes a one-stop shop for all news, local and global, where users can define what types of stories are important to them.

The Knight News Challenge was prompted by concerns about the newspaper industry’s future, says Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer for the Knight Foundation. Newspaper subscriptions are down, and advertisers keep leaving, Kebbel says. The Knight Foundation created the contest, expecting that futuristic, workable ideas could result to continue the beneficial impact that newspapers have had for many decades. Some of the benefits he cites have been binding a community together, identifying problems, and rallying solutions through good editorial pages.

Schultz’s funding is for him to “blog” about the idea through spring at www.pbs.org/idealab. With input from the blog, he hopes to develop his idea more fully until it addresses all of the complexities of a
“user-contributed” news system. He plans to talk with anyone who has ideas to improve a news media system, including journalists, bloggers, and consumers.

 Some fellow travellers and I have launched Mashable City, described briefly below. If Hackable City is about claiming our identity in a community, the convergent Mashable City is about creatively using information about ourselves, our relationships, and our environments to give us and others a lens on that community.

Mashable City is an open community project, aimed at turning Providence, RI into the most mashup-friendly place on earth.

We’re a loose collective that aims to aggregate and organize the city’s information into open data services, setting the stage for a wealth of mashups that will increase the connectivity and social capital of all Providence residents.

We’re just getting started, and there are a lot of things we need to think about.

• What kinds of mashups would you like to see?
• What kinds of data services do we need to set up to make them possible?
• How do we involve as much of our community as possible, to make sure we’re building what’s right for everyone?

We have our ideas, but we want to hear from you, too. Please, join the conversation in our Google Group and help us build the Mashable City.