In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be redesigning the site and posting regularly on City Government as a Platform for Citizens, Transforming K-12 Education, and economic development strategy in Rhode Island. Meanwhile, you can keep up with the emergent City2.0 community through a Twitter List we’ve set up at: http://twitter.com/aptuscollab/citycamp.

Here’s some links to keep you busy while we putter away in the background on the new site design.

CityCamp Forum (new members welcome)

MashableCity (join the Google Group!)

Tim O’Reilly’s session at CityCamp on What Makes a City Great

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.

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…

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.

I see Good to Great’s findings woven throughout Hope’s ongoing story.

• Find a core set of principles and passionately hold to them. For Hope, that was the “Hope Order”, which spelled out a smaller school structure where adults were expected to watch over kids, through advisories, site-based decision making, and mandatory professional development.
• Get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus. The state school commissioner, Peter McWalters, decided that the school would be reconstituted, and if the teachers and staff couldn’t sign on – literally – to the Hope Order, they would have to move to another school. 50% left. Finding few teachers in the district who wanted to step into the breach, Hope went to universities across New England to find new blood who would sign onto the school’s approach.
• Promote servant leadership. McWalters, in my few interactions with him, is a high-competence, low-ego guy. Unlike more flamboyant and press-friendly (or press seeking) superintendents who are often four years and out, McWalters has been in the job of state commissioner of education for 17 years. I may not agree with all of his decisions, but I think he’s in the job for the right reasons. I believe this translated through to his choices for special master and the principals for Hope, after the state took control and reconstituted the school.

As Julia Steiny’s 3 part “Story of Hope” unfolds, I’ll revisit Good to Great’s other lessons, to see whether they hold true, and hopeful, for Hope High.

Hope High School nearly triples its reading scores (Providence Journal)

Over the summer of 2005, the three new academy principals had to hire half the faculty. But who would come to a notoriously chaotic school, except teachers other schools had rejected? After scores of interviews, their yield was small. So they sent recruitment letters to colleges all over New England. At last they managed to assemble a staff who had literally signed on to a common set of best practices.

Not until this point does the story of redemption really begin, because only at this point were all the adults at Hope committed to one vision. And since then, only 8 of the original 108 teachers have retired or moved away. The team kept growing stronger.

But staff stability, planning time, advisories and the like are merely conditions that make success possible. Not guaranteed, just possible. A 21st-century, humane school structure does not by itself produce swell test scores. In fact, many schools have plugged away at splashy educational initiatives only to find they had nothing to show for them years hence.

Not Hope.

In the most recent round of statewide NECAP test scores, the reading scores tripled in the Information Academy — from 20 percent proficient to 60. The Leadership and Arts Academies nearly tripled their reading achievement as well. Granted, they started low. But the Arts Academy’s 65 percent proficient is the highest reading score of any comparable urban high school in the state, except for two charter schools.

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.

“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.