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 [...]

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Not that its exactly hackable, but RISD|Works gets a nice mention in the New York Times travel section this week. Many RISD grads are front-and-center on hacking the urban community in new and interesting ways; close enough for me.
Selling housewares, jewelry, fashion accessories, books and other gifts, the shop carries the work of RISD (pronounced [...]

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I’m a sucker for trying to find valid crossovers between virtual worlds and our real world, where the interplay adds to our face-to-face interactions, rather than simply sucking us into our computers.
Along these lines, I had a great chat with Eric Gordon from Emerson College today, who is shepherding an experiment in Boston called [...]

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Best Places just named their top ten cities in the US for block parties, and Providence ranked #5. I’m not sure how valid the research methodology was, since it was sponsored by a group of BBQ-centric consumer brands, measuring “the frequency and importance of block parties to the community.” But the point is well taken, [...]

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Hackable Idea of the Week has been on a bit of a hiatus, but a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition caught my ear.
Across the country, citizen-run guerilla drive-ins are springing up in municipal public spaces and vacant lots. A loose collective of folks puts together a showing of a movie projected outdoors on the side [...]

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Some folks in south Providence have started a grass-roots organization called Citizens for Resident Permit Parking (CRPP), to advocate for a resident parking permit that allows overnight parking on the streets.
Its unclear yet whether CRPP will position itself as a traditional petition and advocacy group, or harness some hackability principles to influence and craft a [...]

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Over at The Place of Social Media, Eric Gordon is starting a discussion on what the emergence of social media means for cities, communities, and the individuals who live in them. He makes a great point, that “digitally annotated physical communities often rely on the full disclosure of identity for their functionality. For instance, when [...]

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Part of developing a hackable society is having a community of users who also feel willing to engage and capable to contribute. In the past, this has not been the pattern of cities. Experts – politicians, technocrats, and their close associates in law or business – made decisions in small circles where knowledge and power [...]

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From the City News interview series…
My Business: Cranston Street Dairy King Harry Papavasilou doesn’t do it for the money
This Wednesday, one of the warmer days we’ve had so far, many people were flocking to their favorite lemonade and ice cream stands to cool off. One such destination in Providence has been around for almost half [...]

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This week I had a visit from a fellow in Atlanta who is struggling to create positive change and a more engaged society in his own city. He’s a frequent visitor to Providence, and marveled at our manageable scale, overlapping social networks, and cool groups and organizations. He loved the idea of a hackable city, [...]

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